ON A female-only bill, Francesca Martinez revealed why she's a sometime headliner, yet also why – since bursting on to the comedy scene at the beginning of the decade – she hasn't flourished quite as brilliantly as might have been hoped.
Martinez
's cerebral palsy remains the cornerstone of her act and the uniqueness of her experience permits her tremendous mischief at others' expense, not least the audience member whose affliction of being a bad footballer she so mercilessly mocked as a debilitating condition akin to her own.
The former Grange Hill actress is at her surest when she is satirising the patronising attitudes of society towards her, occasionally and effectively adopting the persona of a clueless naïf to ram her points home.
Yet regardless of the chronic fatigue she's endured, which saw her taking a break from live comedy until relatively recently, Martinez's routines citing George Bush's stupidity and Tory voting tendencies as disabilities seemed dated, formulaic and cheap.
Her more personal material, whether it be the double-edged concern of her Spanish grandmother or her desire for a penniless Irish poet is what truly endures, and I, for one, would have been more interested to know just why she accepted and then rejected the role of Olympic torchbearer recently.
Earlier, AL Kennedy over-indulged the hazy focus of her usually compelling stand-up with some fairly generic material on drink and soft drugs, while 21-year-old Kim Griffin showed herself to be an imaginative, precocious writer and one to watch if she can determine to develop her stagecraft and conquer her nerves.
The full article contains 273 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
