The Prodigal Daughter Returns

With the Fringe's big attractions looking glossier and more mainstream by the year, it's easy to forget that the festival can still throw up talent from out of nowhere. When Laura Solon took her first solo show to Edinburgh in 2005, she had a lowly midday spot in the backroom of a small pub. Her tightly scripted, impeccably acted short monologues, with their very English mix of whimsy, eccentricity and sharp social satire, were clearly too good for the space, and word-of-mouth enthusiasm soon grew. Then Solon found herself the surprised recipient of that year's Perrier award, in one of the most pleasingly obscure choices the panel has made in the award's 28-year history.

But Solon has claimed that she dislikes performing live, and that it was always her plan to get into radio and TV as quickly as possible. The award proved "a real launchpad" and she got her wish: she's currently working on the third series of her popular Radio 4 series and has had a pop at television, too. Which makes it somewhat curious that she's back at the Fringe this year with a new solo show: a comic "multi-character narrative" loosely set in the world of publishing. What brings her back?

"Quite a lot of things, actually," she tells me as we sip tea in a noisy cafe at Clapham Junction station, near her super-cheap rehearsal studio (she describes the discovery of this space, for £20 a day in a city where you can expect to pay £200 an hour, as "like finding a unicorn"). "I've only done one live show, and I only did that for two weeks in Edinburgh... And the first time I did it, I just did lots of monologues in a row. Whilst I really enjoyed doing that show, I don't feel that I really used the live space. I mean, you could have recorded them all and just played them. I had a tiny space, I couldn't really do much with it. I think this time round I wanted to really create something that is intrinsically live: you know, it's not like ten sketches, it really is in that environment talking to that audience."

This new-found enthusiasm for the benefits of live performance has a lot to do with Solon conquering one of her demons. "I didn't really use to like live performance at all," she confides. "It used to make me feel very nervous and after Edinburgh I stopped enjoying it; it used to make me feel quite sick with stage-fright, or just nerves. I couldn't really do it." But this has improved with practice. Her radio shows are recorded in front of a studio audience, "obviously no costumes or props, just reading. It was really fun; and I thought, it's actually really fun just to do a show. And in the live format you're completely in control of it, you can do what you want."

Solon talks fondly of her work on Talking and Not Talking, a sketch show whose tight writing and faintly loopy eccentricity have seen it settle very comfortably into Radio 4's comedy schedule. "I think some people see [radio] as something to do before they do TV, but I think it's a medium itself that I'll always want to do. I think it's a really fantastic way of presenting some of your work."

Less successful was her excursion into television, the ITV2 sketch show Laura, Ben and Him – a combined effort with fellow comedians Ben Willbond and Marek Hardy. Compared to the sharpness and wit of Solon's solo work, it was a stilted and rather lame affair. Solon lapses into platitude mode when I ask about it, praising the hard work of the crew and cast and stressing that "it was a fun thing to do." But she's clearly aware that it's not her finest hour, describing it as a "good learning curve, because you realise what doesn't work." It seems she was somewhat frustrated by the constraints of the format, especially as "budgets had come down, and we had to do a lot more in the timeframe.... We just did lots of little things, because we couldn't really afford to do big set pieces. And, you know, I think about eight people watched it," she laughs.

And so back to the Fringe, this time in a larger space more appropriate for her talents. The new show is "more ambitious" than the last, taking advantage of the anything-goes spirit of a Festival where, last year, Solon says she went to a cabaret show where one of the acts was "just this guy putting eggs in his mouth." The tale of a publisher whose star author goes missing after apocalyptically killing off all of the characters in her bestselling post-feminist series of novels, it features a host of interconnected characters, all played by Solon, and is narrated by a frustrated creative type who works in a call centre. "But it might have changed completely by the time I get there," she says.

The Fringe's transformation from experimental hothouse to bustling trade fair continues apace, and by the time you read this, the likes of Julian Clary may well have sold out. But if anyone doubts Edinburgh's continuing ability to foster the weird and the wonderful, it seems Solon might be poised once again to prove them wrong.

Laura Solon: Rabbit Faced Story Soup Assembly Rooms 6-30 August, 5.05pm, £11-12