We are having a very veering day today between the two previously identified extremes of the Fringe timetable - but we are now back in the safe hands of Olga Koch. A favourite of mine who I don’t think we’ve actually gone to see at the Fringe before, but gigs relatively frequently in Bristol and am broadly acquaintances with (even if I am convinced every time that she does not remember who I am, but that’s fine).
This time, Olga’s talking about being rich. Testament to her talent that she is able to pull this off, in this country, in this arts festival, with absolutely no fallout. You love to see it. Her dad got rich in Russia at the fall of the Soviet Union, and here she is to talk about the impact of that.
It’s instructive to compare Olga to Lauren Pattison, from earlier today - both very confident, capable performers, in completely different ways. If Lauren is deceptively confident and capable through her admitted anxiety and lack of eye contact, Olga is brazen in it. She frequently stops the show to offer the audience cups of water, acknowledging the extent to which this is destroying the momentum in the room, and still brings it back again. Genuinely impressive.
She also treads a very careful tightrope of the idea of focus within a show. A lot of acts will start a show supposedly about a specific theme or idea and then - deliberately, actively - veer away from that as if turning a kaleidoscope, flitting back to the central theme every now and then. Others will have a monomaniacal focus on the theme in an often claustrophobic way. Here, there are minor diversions, but they are tightly still thematically relevant - additive to the thesis, not discursive.
A favourite of these, and something I’m always thrilled to see Olga talk about on stage, is her computer science background, which does fit into the “being rich and priviliged” theme, although not as directly as she focuses on. It’s nice to know, with her and Ewins, that there are multiple ways you can be a comedian with a CS degree, and it doesn’t have to be the obvious one.