For the first few minutes of Griffin Kelly’s playful solo show, the dialogue is made up almost entirely of miaows. As two kitties have supper together, there are nervous miaows, flirty miaows and occasionally exasperated miaows (from her) and an inordinate amount of miaow-splaining (from him).
Kelly exaggeratedly dashes from one side of a table to the other to bring this scene to life but her comedy is no spin on Lady and the Tramp’s cutesy dogs’ dinner. They are soon back at hers, vigorously mating, accompanied by orgasmic miaows for him (quickly) and for her (later, with a vibrator, while he catnaps). When her gun-toting husband unexpectedly turns up, the fur flies and so do the bullets.
Dressed in black, with whiskers drawn on her face, Kelly captures cat behaviour in all its glory: the velvety sinuousness, the motoring purrs and the occasional revolting retch. This symphony of miaows could be pushed further and for much longer so it is a momentary disappointment when she steps out of character, the lights go up, and she drops the cat language to fill us in on the backstory of her feline heroine.
The joke then becomes that of a woman exorcising her family demons by acting out a feline domestic saga, alternating between an innocent kitten, her bitterly ruminative mother – lighting up a new cigarette for each epiphany – and her philandering father. These vignettes become increasingly hard-boiled, with an occasional emotional hit, and our host’s obsession with the material leads her to cast audience members in the three roles as she takes a seat in the front row to become their demanding director.
With the zoomies-level energy rarely dipping, it’s a highly physical show with a lot of incidental delights even if it grows into an increasingly tame, conventional fringe comedy hour, with an ending that still needs to be properly licked into shape. Griffin is a performer to her fingertips and if the frenzied pace were to slacken a little more often to let her gestures resonate then the results could be fur-midable.
• At Zoo Playground, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
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