‘Childless cat ladies” have been much in the news since Kamala Harris strode into the presidential spotlight. Might they now have their moment on the Edinburgh fringe? Katie Norris channels most of the qualities JD Vance seemed terrified of when so describing the current VP: single, unfettered, and beholden to no one – give or take Atticus the cat, the battle for whose soul gives Norris’s solo debut, Farm Fatale, its increasingly melodramatic charge.
Norris’s farming childhood is low in the mix here, but offers useful context for her faintly rustic persona: a bit unpolished, too carnal, apt to confuse milking cows with milking boys. Comedy-watchers will knows our host as half of a double act with Sinead Parker, in whose twisted shows she long ago declared her ambition to be “a stepmother and wife”. That same sensibility is at play a decade on, as Norris finds herself sans sidekick, sans man, cohabiting with a gen Z flatmate – characterised here as the innocent cockney handmaiden to Norris’s broken Miss Havisham. She tries dating, but meets only men who dote on James Acaster – or men whom she wants to mother.
Both those instances are animated in song, so drolly that Norris can’t stop giggling. Fair enough: these snapshots of a life in equal parts dotty and desperate are beautifully balanced between stranger-than-fiction verisimilitude (“that’s a direct quote for you …”) and gothic exaggeration – which I assume covers the episode that finds naked Norris pleading for healing at the vet’s. She reads us phone messages from her fatalistic Russian cat-sitter, and WhatsApp group chats with a divorced neighbour and the lady in marketing who makes a rival bid for Atticus’s affections.
“The Taylor Swift of comedy,” Norris calls herself here. But by the latter stages of this hysterical foray into crazy cat-lady comedy, which find our flame-haired host caterwauling her feline sexual fetish like Cathy at the window of Wuthering Heights, Kate Bush makes for a more apt comparison. Directed by Elf Lyons, it’s wonderfully batty and unapologetic, and the occasional songs (music by Chris Thomson and Huge Davies) are all keepers. A solo debut to cherish.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 25 August
