I'm a little bit biased about Iona. From the moment I saw her perform last year in one of the Funny Women Award heats as her character 'Lyn the Confidence Coach' I thought she stuck out immediately. Character comedians can struggle with audiences from the offset, sometimes because the audience anticipates something derivative (which can be the case) or, it can take time to build up trust in a character who may make spectators wait before they drop the laughter clanger. As we always hear too, comedy is subjective and character comedy does not appeal to everyone. One thing that has always struck me whenever I've seen Iona perform, is that the audience is prepared to give her this time. For the most part, because it is just so entertaining to watch a comedian with such brilliant expressions and knack for conveying the body language of all her characters so well.
'Lyn' in particular relies on an audience that is receptive to these nuances, but once they have clicked into the character, they are treated to sharp and succinct writing that always accompanies Iona's work. The simple line of "So, let's get confident," delivered with Lyn's terrifed, supposedly 'relaxed' hand gesture always has the audience in stitches.
In this Edinburgh-preview show we got to see the extent of Iona's talent with some of her other golden oldies and new characters. 'Geneveieve', the terrifyingly confident dance instructor more than over-compensates for the shivering wreck that is Lyn. Entirely comfortable in her own skin she thrusts herself and her highly-inflated ego around the stage while denigrating the class in front of her. Again, aside from the fact this is a very funny character, it's also a joy to watch someone who's clearly a very good dancer not only fully inhibit a character but also move with the bravery and total lack of inhibition required for us to believe it.
For character comedy to work, there does need to be a certain amount of that tricky thing called truth involved, which again is a subjective value for all of us. However, as the audience watched Iona perform, there was without doubt a lot of 'relating' going on from their perspective, evident in the high volume of laughter. One of my favourite new characters was Kicki-mi-ticki Martini, a snooty Shoreditch boutique assistant so desperate to retain a particular stance that every day trips to the toilet are totally out of the question. We've all been looked down upon by a Shoreditch shop assistant at some point, perhaps some more than others, while the vast majority of us have encountered a festival-lover (another new favourite) with more trustfunds than sense and more of a genuine affinity with their coke habit than the 'treeeees man'. Iona interspersed all her characters with another of her creations – one of the world's crassest and most ignorant radio djs, whose enthusiasm for random utterances and acronyms every five seconds, not surprisingly, eclipsed anything of any importance going on anywhere else… "so there's like, been a quake.. somewhere?"
Iona, we can't wait until your Edinburgh show.
Charlotte Browne
