Kirsty Mann leads a double life. Many folks do, these days – a side hustle here, a day job there – but it’s the lengths that Mann goes to to keep her two lives a secret from each other that leads to hilarity and a little bit of blood-stained mayhem. Mann takes us through what happens when her worlds start to collide in an impeccable hour of storytelling with Skeletons at FRINGE WORLD’s Little Palais.
Mann hates the question, “So, what do you do?” and her story goes to great lengths to explain why. She’s not just a comedian, but a doctor (an anesthetist specifically, and one, we later find out, who has difficulty getting a job playing a doctor on TV). She has separate social circles and competing demands that threaten to end either career at any given moment. She’s never told her best friend of 10 years that she’s a doctor, and her boss would have her stricken from the registry if she knew what Mann was really asking leave for (an acting job). All of Mann’s ducking and dodging comes to an abrupt end when the pandemic forces her hand. But now a couple of years on from that devastating period, she’s come clean and revealed her whole self to the world (or at least, the parts of her whole self that make for an excellent 1-hour comedy show).
Skeletons is TIGHT, and god love the in-house tech for keeping up, script in hand. Dotted throughout the show are sound cues that Mann fits short bits of dialogue between (almost like beats in a song), and many, many lighting state changes. Mann delivers anecdote after anecdote with swift changes of accent and mannerism to flesh out the scenes. She even dares to do an Aussie accent, apologising in advance, saying it went over fine in Edinburgh, but may not do so well here. She does great, she’s a natural, and her character shifts take place without any props or other paraphernalia – just good old fashioned embodiment.
Her language is precise and descriptive, full of witticisms you might miss if you don’t pay close attention. She has her audience riveted from the start, and takes us around corners and into rooms where Mann plays out all these fun little encounters with the characters that populate her two worlds.
Each one of these scenes has its own double life too. They serve both to elucidate Mann’s professional, emotional and sexual predicaments, but also to comment on the world as we know it. Mann gives us her oblique take on a range of topics, like women in healthcare, class and the art world, alternative ‘medicine’, and maybe her more direct take on which One Direction doll is the best for certain activities.
Mann is also able to get serious when the situation calls for it, so she briefly pauses the jokes to talk about how deeply she, her colleagues, and her family were affected by the pandemic. It’s an unexpectedly sober moment, but thankfully without being jarring or manipulative, and Mann soon carefully and gently brings us back into levity.
As she finished off with a satisfying final anecdote or two, noise from a helicopter buzzed overhead and fireworks boomed somewhere not too far away. Still, Mann never missed a beat.
CICELY BINFORD
Kirsty Mann: Skeletons runs at The Little Palais at the Pleasure Garden until 28 January. For tickets and more information click here.
