Princess Sparkles @ Hoots Potterrow

It’s Ottilie’s fifth birthday, and we’re all invited. There’ll be party games, bubbles and lots of pink glitter. Unfortunately, given Ottilie’s parents’ choice of entertainer, there might also be some tears.

Enter Princess Sparkles, the creation of sketch comic Lily Maryon in her debut Fringe hour. Sparkles is putting on a brave face after a break-up and grinning through some complaints about her privileged little audience – at least at first. But it’s not long before it all goes south: she accidentally blows a spray of a mysterious white powder over her young charges instead of glitter, can’t quite get her pink dress over her right breast, and ends up drinking from a hipflask.

Sparkles is a well-developed character study of what it is, for many performers, to be a performer: squashing the real self and plastering on a smile to entertain. And Maryon’s skills as a comic actor are in clear evidence: we really do feel like we’re at a children’s party, perhaps too much. By the third or fourth intentionally awkward party game, or the fourth or fifth deliberately overwrought gag delivery, it can feel like Maryon’s sticking to the premise a little too ardently.

As Princess Sparkles breaks down, Sparkles disabuses her audience of the myth of the “effortlessly happy” princess: “Sooner or later, the bubble always bursts,” she says. As Sparkles the character wrestles between trying to teach the kids something true and continuing to perform something appropriate, Maryon the comic stops short of a dissolution that might propel the show into new ground. The show closes not with a big bubble burst but the slightly dampened fizz of party cola – albeit with a line that feels appropriate for a character that hasn’t quite fulfilled her promise: “Grown-ups don’t grow up, they just get better at pretending”.

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Princess Sparkles, Hoots @ Potterrow (Wee Container 1), until 31 Aug (not 24, 25, 26), 11.55pm, £9.50/£7.50