Susie McCabe
Assembly George Square ★★★★
Glaswegian Susie McCabe has established a loyal following at the Edinburgh Fringe over the past few years, and in Coming of Rage she updates them on the past two years of her life.
It’s not been a barrel of laughs. She suffered a heart attack in 2024 (which she talked about her in previous show) and is now divorced from her second wife, but much of this hour is about the death of her father. It is never, however, downbeat as she wrings comedy from really awful life events.
McCabe was tasked with organising her dad’s funeral, which meant an unwelcome visit to the local Catholic priest. She was outraged by his suggestion she choose the Bible readings as, she points out, that’s sort of his job…
The recent divorce resulted in moving with friends for a while – but who needs to be living with a loved-up lesbian couple and their "judgemental cockapoo"? So reluctantly McCabe entered the world of online dating, and we hear about some of her adventures.
But while McCabe is busily rebuilding her life – and happily we get to hear of some positives – she says she’s angry about all sorts of things. When she told a friend the show’s title is Coming of Rage, he suggested it sounded like a perfume – but she said that would smell of “Red Bull and resentment”.
It’s a show with a wide-ranging raft of topics, from football to family, from the menopause to class and generational differences as McCabe, a talented storyteller, weaves a funny tale in which she draws the various strands together.
The pace rather drops off towards the end but this is an enjoyable hour.
Sid Singh
Counting House ★★
It’s easy to like Sid Singh. The comic is an experienced human rights lawyer – and half the proceeds from this show go to supporting the charity Centre for Gender and Refugee Studies (CGRS), for which he volunteers despite having made comedy his full-time career some years ago.
And Love Bombing has a decent premise: he’s going to tell us two tales, one about meeting his stalker, the other about he how sued President Trump.
The first is a bit of a shaggy dog story, as the American self-deprecatingly announces the only thing worse than the state of the world is the state of his love life. Unlike so many men, he dates only women about the same age as him – “Which makes me a hero,” he says with a knowing nod to the audience.
Along the way, he talks about the threat to civil rights in the UK and the US before getting to the Trump story, in which he and CGRS helped a woman from El Salvador, a victim of domestic violence, gain citizenship in the US after many trials and tribulations. It’s a triumphant account of what good people can achieve when they work to a common purpose.
The first two-thirds of the show runs along amusingly enough, but then the laughs dry up, and it feels more like a lecture. However important the subject, a comedy show needs gags.
