Hill serves up delightful menu of comic genres

Fringe review – Bec Hill, Out of Order (rating: 5/5)

This is deconstructed comedy in which Hill offers the audience a menu from a board on stage and they choose the order of the gags.

Hill who hails from Adelaide is a fairly fresh face on the stand-up scene. Her previous credits include Dara O’Briain’s Go8Bit and DC Fancast.

This is a delightful mix of many comic genres with a smattering of surrealism and plenty of prompting from the crowd.

It’s billed as an over 16s show as there are a few gags about rude hand gestures, sexual mores, smear tests and a rather inventive app for street fighters to get together.

On entering the attic in the Teviot’s Turret, which is a tiny little space – my only complaint – Hill greets each audience member with “have a ball” and hands out – yes – plastic balls. I won’t spoil the joke but it is very cute.

There’s a genuine originality here in the material which doesn’t wholly rely on narrative as there are plenty of visuals and props.

A bubble machine sets the scene as Hill – while delivering some scatalogical routines – is essentially as comforting and charming as a little flotilla of bubbles. Who wouldn’t warm to that?

The material is backed up with disco music, flashing lights and flip charts which riff on her childhood, space travel and technology.

There’s also a beguiling tale of being proposed to by her long-term boyfriend while she was on stage, how she couldn’t see over the lights and thought he was a heckler, or worse a heckler who kidnaps and murders performers.

While on stage in Sheffield a heckler threatened to end her show and call the police, so the whole audience moved to a hallway and essentially the show was removed from the heckler. Priceless.

It’s a self-deprecating performance in which her own persona is genuine and generous to the audience. She finishes with flair. Again, no spoilers.

This show oozes charm and originality to the extent of telling the audience she got married five years ago in the venue.

Bec Hill, Out of Order is at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, August 5-27, 5.15pm