Keeping stand-up weird since 2013, Harriet Dyer is everything I love about the Fringe. Where else could you be in a basement full of people applauding moth impressions? Nowhere, that’s where.
Tales of Cornish lobsters and childhood traumas from the West Country’s Harriet Dyer
Thankfully, Harriet Dyer understands our needs to get unhinged at Fringe, offering up tales of Cornish lobsters and childhood traumas, all broken up with some exemplary moth impersonations.
Watching Dyer is like watching our brains on fire, every self-deprecating thought and internal question that flies about in Dyer’s head gets amplified by the mic. This could be jarring for fans of linear narrative forms but it’s also a refreshing reflection of our flappable inner monologues, and hilarious too.
But Dyer is not your average neurotic, her musings always leaning towards the surreal and extraordinary rather than the everyday. We hang on every word as her West Country stream of consciousness takes us on a winding journey to all corners of her childhood upbringing and adolescence, learning how to be (and not to be!) along the way.
Featured across the BBC and on mental health podcast Make Me Better, Harriet Dyer is a key name in the neurodivergent comedy scene. And though mental health is a theme for Mother, it’s also a deeply personal show about family and how your experiences make you. The moral of the story being, if you come up against Dyer and her brightly-coloured family, they will win.
