There’s an awful lot in Marty Gleeson’s Edinburgh debut to like – love, even. Who at this festival is delivering mystical punchlines while playing the bodhrán, like a sort of comedy Enya? Who’s gone to the trouble of producing a full oil painting just for the purpose of a (very good) laugh? Who goes this hard and long for a newsreader impression?
There’s method in this bewildering madness, though. Dog Ear refers to a story from Gleeson’s training, at art school in Limerick, which taught her to appreciate the details – to recognise that audiences see and take in even the incidental edges to a work. It’s a lesson she’s taken to heart and to head, and you can see her hard at work throughout this hour, grappling to leave nothing to chance and everything to craft. It might not be obtuse to suggest a parallel to James Joyce here: Gleeson squeezes meaning into every line that she can, and squeezes boredom out. The latter definitely works best. From a fully fledged funeral to an absolutely pumping close, the head spinning inventiveness, and absolute commitment to fun mark Gleeson out as something special.
But there’s a few sequences where Gleeson backs herself into an imaginative corner that she can’t elegantly get out of. And there’s a third quarter of rambling jottings that can’t quite sustain that mystical sense that everything means something. The result is that this doesn’t quite succeed on its own terms. But those are the terms of an extraordinarily ambitious debut, and a hilarious contribution to the case of comedy as art.
Marty Gleeson: Dog Ear, Pleasance Courtyard, until 30 Aug, 7.15pm