Ed Eales-White: Champions

There’s something sweetly tragic about Ed Eales-White’s Champions. The series of comic characters he creates in this show, though irksome and bearing odiously familiar tics, leaves you feeling predominantly sympathetic.  By the end of their mawkish monologues you just want to hug them.

Perhaps it’s because the former member of sketch trio Clever Peter doesn’t particularly write punchlines; the most brilliantly funny bits of his first solo Fringe show are the details buried mid-skit. Guinness in a Rosé bottle, say, or the favourite salad dressing of pub regular Kenny. They suggest rich histories to his working class characters and invite curiosity to their solitary lives. A cuckolded ex-soldier, a gym fanatic, a needy service station attendant  and even a frustrated poet pigeon are all wonderfully humane, despite their ticklish and tiresome fixations. 

So vulnerable are Eales-White's Champions that they require exhausting amounts of audience interaction, but the atmosphere created by the skilled mimic means this isn't awkward. Indeed some punters feel comfortable enough to contribute their own quips, like one who ad-libs while marooned alone onstage clutching a Twix. It feels natural to do so with realistic characters that are never so strange as to unsettle. 

Still, louder laughter might come from a place of discomfort; it often does. It’s problematic if after encountering Eales-White’s creations you’re more concerned with whether they’ll get home alright than repeating their gags to your friends. Champions has characterization down to a T but could win more chortles by upping the weird.