Sam Kissajukian spent 10 years on the Australian standup circuit but increasingly found himself pulled in two directions. By his own account, the more he delivered the kind of material audiences most responded to, the less true he was to himself. The act of bad faith drove him to quit.
It also precipitated a crisis in his mental health. A six-month manic episode was followed by six months of depression. With his bipolar disorder undiagnosed, Kissajukian became prolifically creative. The title of his show, 300 Paintings (★★★★☆), alludes to the surfeit of artwork he produced when he was not busy upsetting his sleep patterns or asking hedge-fund managers to invest in his self-sabotaging inventions.
In a self-directed production, he talks us through his output with a slideshow and directs us to an accompanying exhibition in a nearby room. It makes for a funny and fascinating study of the mysteries of the mind.
Today, with his health restored, Kissajukian can laugh at his extravagant behaviour, as he worked his way through whole art movements in days or bought hundreds of T-shirts from an all-night supermarket. Yet his paintings are good and his wayward schemes have a semblance of merit. You are confounded to realise the barrage of ideas that make the show so stimulating are also a symptom of his condition. The line between healthy creativity and delusion is thin.
Kissajukian has a strong reason for moving into theatre, but he is one of many standups taking the same route. Ivo Graham jokes that theatre is not just playing music while talking, something he does repeatedly in Carousel (★★★★☆), directed by Matt Hassall. But Graham’s second-person monologue gives him space to be more reflective and poetic than usual – and to present himself in a sometimes unflattering light.
In lesser hands, his confessional tale of fatherhood, separation, family ties, the pull of the past and Taskmaster humiliation could appear self-absorbed (he has a gag about narcissism to get his defence in early), but he writes with enough sensitivity and performs with enough assurance to keep you with him on his regret-laden journey south from Edinburgh Waverley and back again.
Assurance is a quality shared by other comedians taking a theatrical path. Natalie Bellingham, a finalist in the 2021 Funny Women awards, has plenty of it in Look After Your Knees (★★★☆☆), her first play on the fringe, in which she proves herself likable and confident enough to ensure you are intrigued by an otherwise slippery, elliptical piece.
Asking us to stop and take stock of the moment, Bellingham enters wide-eyed and brimming with an uncommon level of positive energy. Describing new-age therapies with wonder and credulity, she has the born-again enthusiasm of a convert. You could take it as a parody of alternative lifestyles if it did not also seem to be a portrait of a damaged woman rebuilding herself. Her occasional violent outbursts suggest a trauma that has led her to the healing power of wood, rocks and sea.
With poetic voiceovers and attempts at reconciliation with an unspecified past, the play is constructed as an impressionistic collage. Directed and co-created by Jamie Wood, it is described as being about the “pain and beauty of growing older,” but its fragmentation makes its true purpose unclear.
No such problem in Son of a Bitch (★★★☆☆), the debut play by Anna Morris, which uses a fictional social-media outrage to examine the pressures placed on mothers of young children. Marnie finds herself cancelled and snubbed when a video of her swearing at her four-year-old son goes viral. She knows instantly her outburst was unacceptable, but there are mitigating circumstances. Directed by Madelaine Moore, the play takes us from the crude binaries of online opinion to a nuanced feminist analysis of cause and effect.
If some of the material feels like gentle observational standup, it is offset by the play’s deeper purpose – to rail against gender inequalities and social expectations of motherhood – not to mention a captivating performance by Morris.
Of all of these comedians, the one who makes the biggest departure is Adam Riches. In Jimmy (★★★★☆), the Edinburgh comedy award winner ditches his usual line in audience participation (I am not the only one to sit on the back row just in case) to embody the figure of tennis champion Jimmy Connors.
He does this with such muscularity, such physical commitment, that the play – directed by Tom Parry – transcends the limitations of the bio-drama format. As he powers invisible balls towards the audience, celebrating wins with a sexual relish and cracking under the strain of superior opponents, Jimmy becomes a study of the drive of the elite athlete to succeed. We are invited to cheer his victories but he is more monster than sporting hero, a man with a famously short fuse, whose success is at the cost of any endearing quality. Fascinatingly, Riches is a comedian playing a man without a sense of humour.