Siân Davies @ Gilded Balloon Teviot

Siân Davies' new Edinburgh Fringe show is an hour of coming-of-age comedy with lovely word play, hedonistic flashes, and a serious political edge

Review by Emma Sullivan | 08 Aug 2022
  • Sian Davies

With In Time, Siân Davies has put together a substantial show, which comes into its own when she relaxes into her natural gift for storytelling. It’s a coming-of-age narrative, which recounts her early days as a self-declared ‘dickhead’ through to a hard-won sense of maturity. Those early days are crammed with colourful incident: endless sessions of pre-drinking with her rugby teammates where daft plans were hatched like pissing in pint glasses to prank other punters (and then accidentally drinking them); free food Friday, where the gang do a runner after eating; and invading Asda en masse and playing cricket with a French stick and a Babybel. 

Lots of the material is marked by a lovely feel for word play and a real gift for world-building through the specificity of time and place. And it’s there too in the detail about her family, remembering her mum’s habit of giving directions using defunct landmarks – and evoking a whole vanished 1990s landscape (C&A, the ice rink). 

Through the hedonism we get glimpses of a harsher reality; the early death of her father and the financial restrictions of a working-class background which mean she only sets off on her gap year travels aged 27 after working from the age of 13, but it’s all told with a light touch. The travel tales seem like more of the same solid storytelling, albeit with the occasional joke that overstays its welcome (the double entendres about the Indian ice-cream brand Fanny for example), but then the show shifts tonally, and it’s here that the moments of social injustice coalesce into something more sustained. It’s material that demands seriousness and while the transition is a little heavy-handed, Davies has earned the right through the quality of her storytelling to speak in earnest about an experience that clearly served as a political awakening.


Siân Davies: In Time, Gilded Balloon Teviot (Turret), until 28 Aug, 5.40pm, £11-13