Sketch is usually a team game – and you could believe there’s a team of comedians at work generating Laura Ramoso’s Frances, a Canadian hit now transferring to the fringe (and London soon). In it, the comic and TikTok star plays character after character, many in the same scene. It’s a densely populated show featuring sketches, improv, character-comedy and a fragmented comic play, performed by a woman whose talent and whole-body commitment to the joke is pretty irresistible.
It’s also a show that pulls in different directions, and platforms one skill that Ramoso does not possess. The central strand of Frances concerns a break-up: in the opening scene, the title character takes a phone call from her ex, Frank, asking to meet after two months’ separation. It blows her world apart. Ramoso then turns for advice to Frances’ best friend, played by an audience member. The story is then re-told from Frank’s perspective, before the estranged lovers meet to battle for control of the breakup narrative.
It’s engaging stuff, has the tang of truth and might have been the basis for Ramoso’s whole show. On the other hand, the sections that lean on audience interaction tread water. Between these scenes, Ramoso performs variants of the sketches that won her a gazillion online views: her Italian dad; her women who’ve just come back from Europe and – overreacting near-orgasmically – want everyone to know it; her no-nonsense German mum (“How can it be a criticism when it is just a fact?”), who here turns the tables on “Lao-ra” with a taste of her own parodic medicine.
Elsewhere a spoof standup routine about how “random” things are devolves into a force-10 randomness involving the standup’s kamikaze mum. A stellar performer, Ramoso throws into all of this every inch of her towering 6ft 1in frame – which is itself the subject of both sketch and song. That concept may scale comic heights, but Ramoso’s singing voice is weak – a rare chink in her armoury of performing skills. Its theme is breakup, but Frances looks like love at first sight between fringe audiences and this impressive all-rounder.
At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Then at Soho theatre, London, 19-30 September.
