Freya Parker @ Pleasance Courtyard

Best known as one half of sketch double act Lazy Susan, It Ain't Easy Being Cheeky is Freya Parker’s solo debut at the Fringe. It’s a polished show, which shares some of Lazy Susan’s distinctively unhinged, off-kilter DNA. However, there is a sense of its ‘cheeky guy’ framing being a sketch idea stretched too thin, and at odds with the nature of Parker’s autobiographical material.

We’re offered a range of concepts to quantify ‘cheeky’ – from a dog in a tiny hat, to a slap on the butt – all part of a peer-reviewed study to be submitted to the ‘Cheeky Chronicle’. It’s easy to imagine this deliberately cringe-cosy conceit fleshed out in the weird world of Lazy Susan, but here Parker’s persona isn’t clear enough, and feels illegible and a bit brittle. The ‘cheeky’ touches do accumulate into something more distinct: making her cheeky guy persona a physical reality, bringing the otherwise perplexing persona into something more tangible across the hour.

The fact is, of course, that it ain't easy being cheeky. Parker explains well the tension or alertness that feels so prevalent in contemporary life, and perhaps the air of brittleness is entirely intentional given her self-diagnosed condition of ‘catastrophist’ (she’s right, we do love a diagnosis, freely diagnosing our friends – behind their backs of course).

She approaches the personal trauma that lies behind her own anxiety carefully – a revelation that explains her love of staged Instagram reunions. And her small victory – able, at least for a moment, to live in the present and not the past – is rather lovely. She’s waving, not drowning, and that’s a triumph in itself.

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Freya Parker: It Ain't Easy Being Cheeky, Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand), until 27 Aug (not 14), 5.50pm, £11-£13