Leila Navabi underwent a baptism of fire in comedy when, aged only 21, her Radio Wales gag about Rishi Sunak “looking like Prince Charles in brownface” triggered a media storm. No fun being hauled across the redtops, and – while owning the joke here, and seeking (with graphics) to prove it – Navabi felt badly advised at the time, then hung out to dry. Why the expectation that she, a political innocent, supply the channel with Sunak-based satire? Because she is brown?
Navabi’s fringe debut Composition isn’t the first show I’ve seen this August that protests the burden of representation weighing on comics with (in her case) “multiple minority identities”. It’s not always the most consistently argued, either. But it speaks eloquently to our liberating-and-confining identity-politics moment, and to the added pressures on performers of colour at the Edinburgh fringe.
