Rachel Kaly @ Pleasance Courtyard
Deceptively casual but shot through with comic craft, Rachel Kaly makes an impressive Edinburgh Fringe debut with Hospital Hour
In deadpan, laconic style Rachel Kaly catalogues her multiple mental illnesses; from OCD at the age of 6 in response to 9/11, through to eating disorders, suicidal ideation and borderline personality disorder, with plenty in-between. Threaded throughout is the figure of her monstrous father, whose delusional and inadvertently comic emails punctuate the show.
Her father’s antics are often the catalyst for Kaly’s disorders. His jaw-dropping behaviour is darkly funny, like when he forces her into his cab after school, and then makes her pay the fare. The consequences of the disorders themselves are also bleakly humorous. After one episode Kaly develops acute psychosomatic problems with swallowing, and getting in calories becomes the central existential challenge: 12 to 4pm each day spent drinking liquid burritos.
Kaly’s approach is deceptive – her awkwardly casual stance undercuts the craft of the writing. Ultimately, it's a matter of recalibrating; there aren't many belly laughs, but plenty of great throwaway jokes, delivered with a mumbled 'whatever'. Kaly's affectless style feels partly generational, and certainly American – in the same ballpark as, say, the sardonic critic and essayist Lauren Oyler, who might ironically describe their shared sensibility as 'the aesthetics of alienation'.
The ending is characteristically artless, but very smart. Her gambit is both a grimly comic acknowledgement of the horror show that is her relationship with her father and a way of capturing the perverse intimacy she has developed with the audience after all the over-sharing. The ending also does the business of callbacks, re-visiting her father’s obsessions and his idiosyncratic phrasing, as well as audience participation. It's a typically ironic and low-key approach to comic mechanics.
Rachel Kaly: Hospital Hour, Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Two), until 25 Aug (not 12), 6.55pm, £9-14