Anna Thomas @ Monkey Barrel Comedy

A Best in Class alumni and a winner of the BBC New Comedy Award, this is Anna Thomas’s solo Fringe debut. A tale of bed rotting, doom scrolling and grief (on both a planetary and personal level), it gestures to a generational set of experiences.

Thomas is a charming performer, and she has an affecting story to tell, but it hasn’t yet come fully into focus. She describes being ill at ease at university and over-doing it: too much drunken snogging in York's premier nightspot, Popworld (a nice gag here about the rotating dancefloor); she contracts glandular fever and has to return to her mum’s – after a time, it becomes hard to leave.

Hit hard by the deaths of several people close to her, Thomas describes a further retreat inside. There are pockets of consolation in unexpected places – a live feed of badgers and their robin companion, for example, and a train cleaner who comforts her when she starts weeping at a vending machine in Tewkesbury station. 'I know what you girls are like for chocolate', he says kindly.

Keen to stay light and hesitant to divulge all the details of her grief, the telling is rather scattered, but the show is just out of previews on our visit and Thomas will undoubtedly relax into the material. Denying grief is like putting a ferret in your pocket, she says, and the task now, like the rhubarb her mum insists on keeping in her room, is to grow towards the light.

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Anna Thomas: How to Juggle a Ferret, Monkey Barrel Comedy (Cab Vol 2), until 30 Aug (not 18), 2.55pm, £8.50-£10.50