Neil Hilborn @ Summerhall, Edinburgh, 23 Aug

Neil Hilborn delivers a lacklustre performance of poems without all of the passion and peculiar ticks that first endeared him to the audience

Live Review by Amy Kenyon | 03 Sep 2018

Edinburgh Poet Matthew Macdonald makes a confident entrance to the stage, as though readying himself for battle or a word-off offensive much like the slam poetry events he regularly hosts and attends as a spoken word artist. Macdonald tells the audience that this is his seventh year performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. He acknowledges what a discerning crowd the annual festival attracts each year and is quick to note that all of his poems have been fact-checked where possible, and in the absence of accuracy evokes his right to artistic license as a poet.

Macdonald is very aware of his audience, he makes cultural references to Love Island and Game of Thrones (joking that this will inevitably impact on the longevity of his work). He even offers to provide offstage support to anyone who finds themselves distressed by his material. Macdonald ends his set with a couple of list poems, including a letter that was originally addressed to a friend who had recently experienced a bereavement, containing a list of fun things to do to distract her mind from grief once the dust had settled after the funeral. The final list poem is a nice palate cleanser to a set otherwise filled with crowd-pleasing platitudes and poems written to "make my mum cry."

It soon becomes clear that Macdonald was less a warm-up and more of an acclimatisation to Neil Hilborn’s heightened state. With the words, “The fuck is happening Edinboro?!” Hilborn arrives on stage looking slightly manic and unkempt, which he blames on the jetlag and his ever-deteriorating mental health which he references throughout his performance, setting a cynical tone for the rest of the material from his latest book, The Future.

The stage becomes a bitter platform for Hilborn who is adept in the art of oversharing and seems to genuinely enjoy alienating the audience, randomly announcing, “I hate cats”, to jeers from the crowd. The poet delivers a lacklustre performance of poems such as OCD and Joey without all of the passion and peculiar ticks that first endeared him to the audience. Hilborn uses words both as a weapon and as a shield in a performance that is disjointed and defensive, before hurrying off the stage and making it clear that he would not be hanging around afterwards.

https://www.facebook.com/neilhilborn/