There were 1,281 comedy shows listed in the Edinburgh Fringe programme last summer. With the best of intentions and drinking as many espressos as possible there is a limit to how many shows a critic like me can review in three weeks. There is always the possibility that a great show might slip through the net. In 2018 there was one that almost got away. Emma Sidi’s Faces of Grace, which I saw on the very last day of the festival.
In this fast-paced one-hander, transferring to Soho Theatre next week, Sidi, 28, conjured up a vivid selection of different characters. They included an unhinged nurse, a choreographer with some decidedly unusual dance moves and a hapless reality television wannabe who perpetually fails her auditions.
Yet the closest the star got to a prize was when her flatmate Rose Matafeo won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award and proudly brought her trophy home.
The gifted mimic — her surname means “sir” in Arabic and comes via her Jewish grandfather — has a hunch about why she went under the radar. “My theory is that character comedy is seen as its own genre and is maybe less well regarded. I think it’s seen more like kicking about with wigs.” Stand-ups, it seems, hog the limelight with their sexy confessional sets.
Yet some of the most entertaining, innovative performers at the moment are character comedians. Sidi cites Lolly Adefope, Nick Mohammed and Adam Riches as contemporaries sharing a similar multiple-personality style onstage. It is also a useful way of landing acting roles. Sidi appeared in W1A and more recently as vlogger Millipede in BBC Three’s Bafta-nominated Pls Like.
Television clearly has less of an issue with character comedians than critics and judging panels. The aforementioned Mohammed has recently shot a Channel 4 pilot featuring his Fringe creation Mr Swallow. And Sidi has two further projects of her own in very early development stages.
There is Sarah Got Dumped for Comedy Central, in which she plays dancer Alexa, a woman who “gets dumped in every episode”. And then there is Party Game, which she is working on with Lolly Adefope and Matafeo for BBC Studios but is sworn to secrecy about.
Her oddly-accented stonewashed denim creation Britta (“like a Brita filter; although I’ve got no filter”) might have television legs too. The character has already appeared in a BBC Three short about relationships. “She insists that she is British despite living all over Europe. I find her easiest to do — sometimes I don’t even have to script her that carefully.”
Sidi suggests Britta might be the character that is closest to her real self. “I’m from Woking, which for me feels like not being from anywhere.”
Like all of her characters there is an underlying sense of being adrift to Britta. “I think that’s right. They are all searching for that one thing that’s going to make their life amazing. It’s a very current theme. It’s why reality TV is so big, people are desperate to get that special thing.”
Sidi, who now lives in Stoke Newington, left Woking to study Spanish and French at Cambridge, where she joined the Footlights Society — which has turned out classic comics for generations, from Fry and Laurie to Mitchell and Webb. Although she has suburban roots she was actually born in America because her father Paul, who played professional rugby for Harlequins and England, was working in finance there. “I left when I was three so can’t remember much except for watching a lot of Sesame Street.”
When they were back in the UK and Sidi was 10, however, her family went through a life-changing event. Her father was badly beaten up during a mugging and suffered a severe head injury. “I remember he wasn’t much like himself for two years,” she recalls.
He is fully recovered now but was in a rehabilitation unit for a long time. While there he decided that the high pressure world of banking was not for him. “He was so inspired by the treatment he received that he decided to retrain as a physiotherapist.”
Father and daughter are mutually supportive. She recently tweeted a link plugging his practice: “He’s very good — and handy if you live near Chertsey.”
I suggest that maybe she developed the desire to create imaginary characters to avoid dwelling on the reality of what happened to her father, but she isn’t convinced. “People are desperate for a reveal — ‘I’m Emma and my dad nearly died’. But I don’t think that’s the case.”
She suggests it was her suburban adolescence in Surrey that had more of an influence on the way she’s turned out. “I loved it but it’s such a commuter-belt place. It’s a great place for imagining you are something else.”
She recently performed in New York but definitely prefers the healthy London comedy club scene, where the genders onstage are now very mixed. “Promoters feel awkward if they don’t put women on the bill and quite rightly so.”
But she is concerned at how men seem to get more respect from reviewers. “Women get pigeonholed in a way men don’t. Male comedians with silly props get described as ‘original’ or ‘genius’ whereas when a woman does it it’s ‘quirky’. It’s not that you can’t call women quirky, it’s just that men are rarely called that and it gets a bit tiring when you are never described as original.”
Sidi is not sure if she’ll be going back to the Edinburgh Fringe this summer but she’s not bitter about being overlooked by the awards judges. “It’s best to only get stressed about what’s in your control. How I’m perceived isn’t in my control. The writing and costumes is.”
Maybe she should play them at their own game and try stand-up? She laughs at the suggestion. “If I did stand-up I wouldn’t know what to say. I prefer to communicate through the medium of bat-shit people!”
Emma Sidi: Faces Of Grace is at Soho Theatre, W1 (020 7478 0100, sohotheatre.com), from February 12-16
