Abi Roberts Takes You Up the Aisle

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Weddings are extravagant affairs; costly to attend while all the main performers (or their parents) basically bleed money. The same could be said of a Fringe run, so you’d better be pretty sure you have a show before you wed it to Edinburgh. Abi Roberts Takes You Up the Aisle is sadly not quite a show. Skirting the categories of cabaret and comedy it lands in something of a hinterland: "confessional karaoke". It's almost genre-defying, but not interesting enough to merit even that plaudit.

It opens with Roberts bounding up a makeshift aisle in wedding lingerie and hair rollers. She appears quite wonderfully deluded, so it’s disarming when she speaks and turns out to be rather more self-assured and responsible than her get-up suggests. “I want to be a gay icon,” she confesses, but she’s just too ordinary.

Though a competent singer, Roberts’ show dwells too heavily on dull, indulgent personal anecdotes between songs: a failed marriage and forays into internet dating breed few laughs, as it turns out. Her original numbers are accompanied by tinny and overproduced backing tracks which lace a dispiriting sheen on Roberts' belting voice. “This is just quite a camp show,” we’re assured, before Roberts prays to "the God of Ryvita" to fit into her wedding dress. That’s not camp, that’s reality TV and beauty magazines. Roberts needs to subvert something other than the expectations for a Fringe show if she really wants to be a gay icon.