Laura Davis – Cake in the Rain

Laura Davis has been working in comedy for a decade now, with a string of TV credits to her name. For all her experience and relative success, she has virtually no profile in the UK, her current Fringe run prompting the 29-year-old to travel outside her native Australia for the first time. Going in to Cake in the Rain cold is a genuinely exciting experience as it feels like watching a vital, fully-formed talent emerge from out of nowhere.

Pay close attention to Davis's performance and you can just about appreciate the amount of graft that's got her to where she is. The moral implications of her more challenging routines have been rigorously thought through, the performer frequently criticising and exonerating herself both at once.

Her own comedic voice is equally dualistic, alternately tender and cutting. Davis chooses her words with precision, but gives free rein to herself as a performer. In one of Cake in the Rain's most memorable segments, she repeats a simple phrase until every syllable has been explored to its fullest, its absurdity made clearer with each utterance.

We're given the impression that Laura is suffering from cabin fever at the Fringe, where she is performing nightly in a claustrophobic room. It'd be a great shame if she were never to return to the festival. Audiences are urged to marvel at her while they can.