Pleasance Courtyard , Edinburgh
Making her fringe debut, the comic performs a droll, unsentimental and occasionally heart-stopping pas de deux with the critical voice in her head
Hannah Platt has body dysmorphia and doesn’t like being looked at – but here she is on a stage, all lights on her. She’s northern, so doesn’t like showing vulnerability – but here she is opening up publicly about her mental health. The contradictions pile up in Defence Mechanism. They also create space for this fringe rookie to ply her choicest comedy – as when she puts her audience on the spot, asking us to assess her looks. If that’s not the sound of a pin dropping, it may just be that Platt’s humour here is sharp enough to draw blood.
That’s certainly the case in the opening stages, which address our host’s issues with her body and self-esteem – a subject around which she might profitably have constructed the whole show. She shares her strategies for unearthing what friends really think of her, and for translating compliments, oh so easily, into insults. She describes how laughter makes her paranoid, then we encounter her out in public, riding alongside scallies on a city tram and trying, on her therapist’s instructions, to coax her self-loathing towards happier perspectives.
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