Review: Ginny Hogan: Regression

A former Silicon Valley data scientist, Ginny Hogan set herself two major goals for the time she turned 30 – a good job and a stable relationship. Taking an analytical approach to both, she's plotted her progress on graphs that she's sharing in her Fringe debut, the path to fulfilment less than predictable on both counts. The variables that the dryly sardonic and sharp, clever comic failed to properly consider were her alcoholism and mental health struggles. OK, she'd accounted for them to an extent. But generally in positive terms, with the booze oiling her dates and the more prolific bursts in her sex life, the drugs boosting her productivity when she made the leap into writing and stand-up. You put garbage data in, you get garbage data out. At least at 32, having spent time back living with her parents and tutoring the sort of clueless, privileged kids she used to be, Hogan can be wise after the fact.

Regression is rather blow-by-blow and blandly episodic in its account of the American's trials and tribulations. And she's not the most engaging, animated performer, echoed by her PowerPoint imagery, which is staid, the joke that she's a fool to be applying maths to unquantifiable love and fate one that's pretty much established in the first graph. Nevertheless, get onboard with her story and it's rewarding, with sly, satirical gags about gender double standards, the myopic romantic preoccupations of men and the self-deceiving logic of addicts.