Review: Nothing Personal, Gilded Balloon Patter House

Stand-up comedy has a reputation of being a boy’s club. Rumours leak out every now and again about how female comedians are warned to avoid certain male comedians, but rarely are those males named. It’s as if they are protected. Because if someone does speak out, they risk damaging their own career more than the person they are calling out. It’s this idea that is at the heart of Ally Ryan’s Nothing Personal.

Megan is a female stand-up, back home in Ireland after struggling to make inroads in London. It’s not helped by the fact that she threw a ham at a famous comedian, whose nickname of Gropey Bob should tell you all you need to know. But the stand-up bug is not one she can let go of easily, because as she tells Tom, the one man who doesn’t seem to be a predator, being on stage is the only time she feels she can be real. She soon stumbles upon a winning formula for her routines, calling out a collection of bad dates. It’s great for her career as her social media likes skyrocket, and to begin with it seems justified. After all, isn’t she just calling out predators, albeit not the male comedians who stay unnamed. But as she goes on more dates with the sole intention of garnering new material, the men she preys upon become less predator and more just slightly strange, surely not deserving of being called out so publicly for a little bedroom kink. But Megan can’t get enough, of bad dates or social media followers.

There are some great ideas holding Nothing Personal together. The idea that being mean to people who probably don’t deserve it is clearly channelled through her strong stand-up skits when she belittles her dates to their faces, excited afterwards as her social media followers grow. It plays nicely with the simple fact that social media works best for its creators when it is being vicious; hate sells. This is layered on top of the always interesting question of how silence is complicity, here used to great effect when played against the struggle for a woman to be allowed into that inner sanctum of the boy’s comedy network.

Where Nothing Personal struggles though is in its overall structure. Its central themes are sound, but each seems slightly underdeveloped, not fully integrated with each other. It feels as if it is written in sections then welded together. There’s an amusing opening that bears little relevance other than to introduce Gropey Bob. Then there is an equally funny middle as she begins to go on her weird dates to build her stand-up routines. Finally, there is a powerful end where she addresses her complicity, and how her meanness might be great for her career but not for her efforts to be a nice person. Individually all delight, and yet together they don’t quite create a complete whole. The opening doesn’t really set strong enough foundations, while the middle is too loose. The three parts need to be better intertwined.

But there is plenty to enjoy. The stand-up routines show Ryan’s ability to write genuinely funny material and the way the light is ultimately shone back on her, as we are left to question if she is really any better than the male comedians she rallies against, is a strong core. It’s a powerful ending that does leave plenty to ponder, especially as we continue to hear stories of predatory comedians who are yet to be named and shamed.

Written by Ally Ryan

Directed by Emily Bradley

Tech by Ash Dawes

Production Management by Saoirse Carey

Produced by Lucy Richards-Smyrk

Belly of the Whale Theatre

Nothing Personal plays at Gilded Balloon Patter House until Monday 31 August as part of Edfringe

https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/nothing-personal