Last night at The Leadmill, Chloe Petts attracted a rather varied audience. This showed when she asked the ‘gays’ and then the ‘straights’ to woo, although from the latter she received a much more convincing response. Looking around, it was a real mix, between millennials and middle aged people, with a scattering of under-25s. The crowd didn’t surprise me; they were as enthusiastic as I expected them to be upon arrival (this being medium enthusiastic), and although they took a lot of warming up, Petts managed to keep the crowd engaged throughout her show.
I saw Petts’ show when it first launched at Edinburgh Fringe last summer, and to be honest I was worried it would be the same. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the show had developed, probably because she had performed it so many times. I have been to comedy gigs which I have seen more than once before, and I have been disappointed to find that they have been very samey, but somehow Petts managed to make this one different from the last I saw, and probably from every other gig she’s done on this tour. Her stage presence and improvisation are likely to blame, but I think they make for a good comedian.
Opening for herself, because she doesn’t need a man to open for her (or let her open, like she did for Ed Gamble’s tour), she spent the first 20 minutes of her show trying to find her pension. If you weren’t there, it’ll seem weird. But after asking the front row what jobs they did, and finding out someone worked for Aviva, she started frantically talking about how she has a number of pensions lost to the system. A kind member of the crowd directed her to the government pension tracking website, where she looked up her old place of employment and discovered her pension could be with one of five companies. Perhaps the most random opening to a comedy show I’ve seen, this actually had me in fits of laughter. Maybe it was Petts’ body movements and persona, or maybe I was just confused. Either way, it was funny and memorable.
After a short interval, Petts returned to the stage to talk about how she’s one of the lads. A proper football lad: six feet tall, six feet wide, with a massive head. She got the crowd laughing with jokes about football, but then moved on to link football and lad culture to her own experiences with gender, specifically with being misgendered. Looking around at the crowd, I felt slightly concerned when she started talking about the culture war over gendered toilets, because I wouldn’t be shocked if a few members of the audience took a double take at a masc-presenting person going into the ladies’ room. Saying this, it seemed to go down well, and Petts found a good balance between talking about serious social issues and comedy. Even when she started passionately shouting about trans-rights she still found space to slide in a joke and make the audience laugh.
Overall, I think Petts is going somewhere. Her shows are significant and witty, and she is a ‘proper laugh.’
