Social media rewards high concept, quick-hit ideas, and Tatty Macleod had a peach of one when she began uploading her French v English sketches during lockdown. But can they make the switch to the stage? In Fugue, the 34-year-old sensibly opens the concept out, splicing her cross-cultural observations with the origin story of her newfound status as “that French TikTok lady”. The show leaves you in no doubt that our amiable, on-point host – pink of hair, Breton of top – has the chops to make it in live standup, even if the all the national stereotyping soon starts to feel maigre.
I say stereotypes, but at least they are based in Macleod’s lived experience. She and her three sisters were raised in Brittany by their English mum, for whom Tatty had to translate, greatly to her advantage, at parent-teacher meetings. So began a life lived in France and England, without ever really feeling as if she belonged on either side of the Channel. It is a background that can’t help but generate outsider insights – which is why it is underwhelming to field cliches here about language-of-love French Lotharios, rude Parisians and (not even the Americans are spared) ignorant transatlantic tourists.
They are cliches because they’re true, I suppose. But Fugue is more effective when Macleod subverts rather than confirms expectations – with a neat switchback, say, in her joke about the French waiter who insists on speaking to her in English. Her own story, too, is a compelling one, of a woman caught between cultures – ill-versed in Englishness, but now (thanks to Brexit) unable to live in the country she once considered home. It is brought to bear with a light touch, that perspective, but it supplies Macleod’s frothy, familiar French v English shtick with that soupçon of substance from which live shows, if not TikTok videos, greatly benefit.
• At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
• All our Edinburgh festival reviews
