Amy Mason @ Pleasance Courtyard
Amy Mason's debut Edinburgh Fringe hour is a delightfully deadpan exploration of her queer identity
Married with two young children, Amy Mason came out in her 30s, and had to radically remake her life. In her debut Fringe show, Free Mason, we see her making her way in a new world, perplexed by queer life and etiquette – rather like Jessica Fostekew in her questing, late-to-the-party exploration – but with an unblinking, deadpan stage presence that is distinctively her own.
She brings a bag of Doritos to a queer potluck party, and they sit ignored amidst the exquisite vegan spread, a metaphor for her own haplessness, a misfit amongst a new generation. Despite all the hyper-articulacy about sexual identities, though, an encounter reveals that the misreading of signals is still a problem – and she wonders if, for all the progressive language, anything has really changed.
Mason's great on child-rearing: the rapacity and narcissism of young kids, and the feats of self-control required, as well as the small satisfactions like secreting vegetables in their food, now more out of spite than any concern for their health. The parallels between her kids' demands and the fruit fly's peevish offspring is another delight. The kinship between animals and humans is a thread that loosely binds the whole show together – populated as it is with masturbating hedgehogs, moths, cows, sheep, and a dead dolphin.
Amy Mason is searching for her own particular brand of belonging, ideally a coven of sorts, and the show ends with a tableau of a particular kind of grubby happiness. Once someone who things happened to (marriage, pregnancy), there is the exhilarating sense in which she is now actively choosing her path. She is, finally, a Free Mason.
Amy Mason: Free Mason, Pleasance Courtyard (Cellar), until 26 Aug (not 12), 8pm, £9-12