Yianni Agisilaou: Pockets of Equality

★★★
comedy review (edinburgh) | Read in About 2 minutes
Published 16 Aug 2017
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This confident Aussie had a good August last year with a Simpsons-related show, which is touring soon, but back at the Fringe he's gone for a more niche subject this time: pockets. They’re a niche in themselves, when you think about it, and we don’t all have them. That’s Agisilaou’s point, that the lack of practical pockets on women's clothing is the patriarchy in full effect: women are forced to put fashion before function.

He came to that conclusion after accidentally wearing his girlfriend's jeans one day, and finding nowhere to keep stuff – so he wore them for the next four days, to explore how being out of pockets changed his life.

You can well imagine that a stint of trouser-swapping seemed a kernel for a whole show at one point, but given that those few days end up as a quick aside here, it presumably didn’t yield much more juice. Still, it’s an interesting point, which leads into a further exploration of gender, and where we are in 2017. There are some genuinely interesting facts along the way—is ‘women and children first' still a thing?—although he could do with finding a new way to describe the more ludicrous gender imbalances: the word 'insane' does rather lose its impact after repeated uses.

Agisilaou covers dodgy male behavior too, some of it from himself. That slightly alarming story emerges oddly late in the piece, and would have given the show real, memorable power had he opened up with it, and explored it along the way. Maybe next year, Yianni.