It’s about this stage of the fringe – past halfway, not yet on the home straight – that comics really feel those chains to the wheel. Atsuko Okatsuka makes a play of it here: she’s stuck in a bunker, Groundhog Day-ing her show and so homesick she starts delivering her material only to the Americans in the audience. That joke could easily go wrong. But it marries well here with Okatsuka’s put-upon persona, as she tells the story, very shaggy-doggily, of an intruder in the grounds of her and her husband’s LA home.
That story is little more than the string on which she pegs a series of tenuously connected routines – on marriage, on trying to impress teenagers, and on her gran (who featured in the drop challenge video, not mentioned here, that went viral on TikTok earlier this year). But the 34-year-old stitches it all together effortlessly. And it’s fun to spend time with her stage self – a little incapable, a little on edge, at a bit of an angle to grownup American life. Whether that’s anything to do with having spent seven years undocumented after migrating to the States, or having a mum with schizophrenia – well, Okatsuka jokes about both, but makes a big deal of neither.
Given that personality, it feels slightly odd that married life plays such a prominent role in The Intruder. But we’re wrong to associate marriage with maturity: it’s a childish arrangement, Okatsuka insists – and in any case, she treats her husband like her dad. The image is well-wrought of wife-child Atsuko cowering – packing her suitcase, indeed – while her alpha husband squares up to their unwanted visitor outside. Elsewhere, one or two of the sub-routines (re-naming mental illnesses as fairground rides, say, or taking her granny to a Vegas stripshow) feel like a draft short of full effectiveness.
But, as the intruder plot is tied up with a satisfying clutch of callbacks and a strategic contribution from mum and gran, the abiding impression is of an artfully offbeat and engaging standup – whose homesickness will not, one hopes, rule out a return visit.
Atsuko Okatsuka: The Intruder is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 29 August.
