It simply wouldn’t be the Fringe without a Mat Ewins show. It’s also nice that he’s settled in MB4 at this point, because it’s a wonderful room for him, the right measure of basement and sophistication. Which he needs this year, because I do think it’s a more ambitious show in some way than previous years - there’s even stuff actually moving around stage!
There is, to be fair, a fair amount of material in this show I’ve seen before, and has actually been in previous shows. Honestly, though, I’m not really complaining - when you have as bit as good as the Schindler’s List bit, obviously you use that again at some point. And surely a lot of it just came out of him realising how much Richard Gadd footage he had lying around.
I think the game show-ification of it, which is an increasing theme in Ewins’ shows, is a mixed bag - it sometimes requires too much of an audience who don’t want to be demanded of. The poor… more senior genetleman in front of me seemed quite lost in general, let alone trying to shoot an arcade gun at the screen. This is covered up slightly better in other areas, with Phil Ellis being a tad more adept at improv with the audience and drawing some good stuff out of the heist game.
Let none of this give you the impression that this hour wasn’t uproariously funny, because it was. I cannot count the moments I was trying to catch my breath for laughter, and it’s always with Ewins the centre of the Venn diagram of innate humour and the unnecessarily complicated coding that’s happening in the background - the element of the chat bot he introduced last year is still delightful, but he managed to kick it up a notch further with video #752 this year. Absolutely incredible.
Always a fun meta game with Ewins of how truthful is he being. This is at least the third time he’s spent a Fringe show talking about how it’s the last Fringe show he’s going to do, which we can clearly discount as nonsense for now, but I do think/hope he and Kate got engaged, with or without the assistance of a genie.