ON PAPER, Edinburgh-on-Sea is a great idea – a cabaret show in a steamy swimming pool with a rotating line-up of comedians, poets, musicians etc, where the audience is encouraged to take a dip. The night I went, though, it was an exasperatingly scrap
py affair, where the performers – bikini-clad host Liz Bentley plus friends – seemed to be having more fun than anyone else.
Claire Benjamin's spoof Weimar cabaret was mildly amusing, but the less said about the rest (feeble comic poetry, mostly), the better. Your own friends mucking about in a pool would be as entertaining. But with a stronger line-up – John Hegley and Isy Suttie are promised – this might just stay afloat. Ask who's playing before shelling out your cash.
But any night at Edinburgh-on-Sea is likely to be a better bet than Bentley's other show, Liz Bentley-on-Sea, in which some half-baked poems (they're deliberately bad, I'm assuming, but also just bad), one-joke songs, and rambling sexual confessions are somehow strung out to an hour. It's like a peculiar cross between Josie Long and Tracey Emin, but far less engaging. She's a good swimmer though.
• Until 24 August. Today 10:38pm and 9:30pm respectively
The full article contains 228 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
