Straight from the benches of parliament, Mhairi Black brings her debut hour Politics Isn’t For Me to the Edinburgh Fringe. Whilst it isn’t outrightly a criticism of the Westminster system, but even just by her description, it becomes one. In this show, Black shares anecdotes about her time in Westminster and her earlier life, and just gives some insight to how it all works.
It's political catharisis at it's absolute finest.
Even as Black calls this show ‘onstage therapy’ and looks to introduce people to herself and background, the political outshines the personal. There's quite a masochistic element in us wanting to hear about her time in Westminster, almost like we’re egging her on to tell us just how bad it is, for her to give us something to be outraged about. And through this hour, we do learn a lot; how much worse it is than we expect it to be, and just how close the parallels are between different places in the British roadmap to power.
Black has as much of a presence onstage as she does in all the viral videos of her speaking in parliament. And although this is rightly described as a TED Talk on the Westminster system, it still manages to be a comedy show and it's still inherently funny. An absolutely hilarious one that everyone should absolutely go see. The jokes and punchlines aren't always obvious, and they’re wrapped up in the preamble so that there’s almost differentiation between what is an ‘obvious’ joke and what is an offhand comment. The stories themselves are absurd even in the premise of some of them, and they're told in a way where we are left to fill in the blanks ourselves and the laugh comes from the shared experience of that system and watching those people. Black has a deadpan, sarcastic and dry tonality which makes just about every second sentence funny in some way, just based on her delivery, as if the subtext to everything is, "Can you believe this?!". It's such an interesting hour that you don't notice the time pass, we're just enraptured by Black. It falls somewhere between a university politics lecture and just talking to a friend about politics over a pint.
Ultimately, Politics Isn’t For Me is a criticism of British institutions, and showing how they were built and who they were built for. It's political catharsis at its absolute finest.
