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Thanyia Moore: August

 
Esther Review by Esther 4 Published: 24 Aug 2025 Pleasance Courtyard Show Dates: 30 Jul 2025-24 Aug 2025

The room is close to packed for Thanyia Moore’s August at Pleasance Upstairs. She repeatedly thanks us all for coming, even the stragglers. “’Cause if you had asked me to come to your show upstairs, I wouldn’t have come,” she says.

Moore's conversational tone and razor wit maintains a light energy in the room

Moore eases into the show with some crowdwork, which she does with the naturalness of someone with more than a decade’s worth of experience under her belt. There is a sense that she does this for our benefit and hers, as August covers how, on what was supposed to be the first day of her debut run at the Fringe in 2022, she had a miscarriage. Moore doesn’t allow the quiet that falls over the room to last long: “Stay with me, I’m fine now. But if you don’t laugh, I’ll be sad – irony.”

Moore doesn’t deal with sadness well, we learn over the hour. She says she texted the only five people who knew she was pregnant about what had happened, then proceeded to block them. “I needed time to work out my material before they got involved,” she says wryly. As she was waiting to be seen at the hospital, she began composing August, because “as a comedian, we don’t have a bad day, we just find material.”

The conversational tone in which Moore shares her story, and her razor wit, maintains a light energy in the room that belies the subject matter. She matter-of-factly lets us know she went back to London for treatment and then returned to Edinburgh to finish out her Fringe run – all while continuing to avoid concerned loved ones, including her partner. Rightly or wrongly, Moore doesn’t care for our opinions, nor does she need them. Despite what she went through, she’s proud of herself; she made it to the end, even getting her first standing ovation in the process.

Which was deserved then and certainly warranted now – though when some of us start to stand up and cheer at the end of August, Moore warns: “No, stop or I’ll block you.”

Throughout the show, she says she tried to remind herself to enjoy the view on the various trains she had to take. Hopefully she can enjoy the rightly earned flowers we’re trying to give her too.

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The Blurb:

After 10 years of comedy, Thanyia was finally set to do her long-awaited, anticipated debut hour at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Everything was going to plan. Then August happened. A show about mental strength, the female body and how awesome the NHS is in Scotland. As seen on Mock the Week, Alma's Not Normal, Celebrity Mastermind, Richard Osman's House of Games, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, and more. Comedy Breakthrough Award-winner, Vault Festival 2023. Best Show nominee, Leicester Comedy Festival 2024.