In Profile: Isy Suttie

Isy Suttie is back at the Fringe this year with her third stand up show, Pearl & Dave. The show tells the story of a couple who meet while on holiday, fall in love, lose each other and then find each other on Facebook ten years later. An internet love story where Suttie plays all the characters, it's a far cry from Dobby, the World of Warcraft-loving IT geek she plays on C4’s Peep Show. 

Suttie debuted at the Fringe in 2007 with Love Lost in the British Retail Industry, following this up in 2008 with The Suttie Show, which she admits was a "hard sell, it was a bit forced". Suttie took a break from the Fringe and returned to her old material, successfully touring Love Lost in Australia and the UK until last year. Now she's back in Edinburgh with material that “is ready to be told, it’s more like the first time, more natural." Pearl & Dave is interwoven with anecdotes and musical vignettes from Suttie’s own love life. Is leveraging her own heartbreak for comic effect potentially a bit raw? “Enough time has passed,” she explains, “for it to be funny rather than sad. And besides, I like being honest, it works.” Her candour is reminiscent of Dobby who, Suttie admits, is “quite similar to me: she’s basically more hardcore than what I am.”
 
Suttie is sweet but not saccharine, earnest but not annoying and, importantly, feminine but not feminist: being a female in the industry “is irrelevant, it’s just not a big deal and a lot of that is down to people like Jo Brand, who did all the hard work for us." There still exists a perception in some audiences that a comedienne's material is only funny if it's based on the crude and debasing aspects of being female - a misperception that acts like Suttie's easily rectify.

Her recent absence from the Fringe makes her return this year all the more exciting, and with only one day off throughout her 25-day run, her survival advice is dietary based: “In 2008, I tried to eat a whole fish every day, but it didn’t last. I think so long as you have lots of fruit and veg, you don’t necessarily need a whole animal a day to survive the Fringe.”

Isy's hot hints for the fringe: watch out for the former Penny Dreadful triumvirate (David Reed, Thom Tuck and Humphrey Ker), Bridget Christie, Josh Widdicombe, Elis James and Matthew Crosby