When a character comic bids farewell to their character, is it a death – or a rebirth? Fringe veteran and sometime Ricky Gervais collaborator Colin Hoult has been performing as the indiscreet thespian Anna Mann (“I was in the same hand gestures class as Helen Mirren”) for years. But now Anna is taking her final bow. A terminal doctor’s diagnosis is hinted at, which is all the prompt she needs to re-tread for us her life’s journey: the escape from Nottingham, the whiff of the greasepaint, the many marriages. But the real story of Anna’s swan song starts leaking out, through the loose stitching that holds this lovable but vague character together.
What emerges is a show with a surprising emotional underpinning, a show that – while on a superficial level is as silly as can be – treats Anna’s death, and that of her ever-so-humble sister Jane, with a degree more seriousness than you’d expect. That this doesn’t overbalance the comedy is testament to the levity elsewhere, as this gushing theatrical dame hymns her career peaks (Predator the Musical; the video nasty Cannibal Bagpipers), winces at her relationship troughs (finding her action-hero husband in bed with her best friend) and interacts camply with the crowd.
The chief pleasure is the persuasiveness of Hoult’s creation. The luvvie cadences are pitch-perfect, Anna’s self-dramatising consistently amuses, and her past is populated by a winningly ridiculous array of husbands, sexual encounters and stage credits. All this is achieved without remotely pretending that Anna isn’t made up – just a bloke in a dress whose biographical details might as well have been written in the wind.
Perhaps that’s because, rather than meticulous characterisation, the point of Anna Mann may have been to let Hoult be who he wanted to be on stage – a usefulness she has now outlived. As these ideas emerge, after a touching reverie that finds Anna embarking on her heavenly journey, the show makes a late and fairly cursory application to the pantheon of fringe comedies about mental health. It’s barely that – but it is an elegiac send-off for this fringe staple, and a new start, too, for the man behind the not-very-concealing mask.
Colin Hoult is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
