Itchy Brighton article
Solon a roll
Itchy finds out how to win the Perrier Comedy Award
Laura Solon and I are having lunch in a so-hip-it-hurts Japanese restaurant in the West End of London. Over sushi, this charmingly self-deprecating yet enormously gifted performer - who out of the blue won the coveted Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival last summer with her acclaimed character-comedy show laughs out loud about how much her life has changed over the last twelve months. “It’s amazing,” beams Laura, who is embarking on a major national tour with the show this summer. “This time last year, I’d have been at home eating beans on toast for lunch I still can’t believe how my life has been turned around. I’ve got a shiny trophy at home now, but I haven’t got a shiny trophy shelf for it. Perhaps my mum can display it somewhere horribly prominent - and I’ll be too embarrassed ever to visit her again!” Taking a swig of fizzy water, the comedian, who turned 26 last August, reflects that the Perrier victory came at exactly the right moment for her. “Before Edinburgh, I was thinking, ‘am I doing the right thing? Do I want to be earning this little money? If I’m edging towards thirty and earning less than I did as a student, should I let the industry tell me to stop?’”
Laura, whose show was at the unfashionable Holyrood Tavern at the unfashionable time of 1.30pm, admits that “before the Festival, I was fully prepared for the fact that my show might not work. The problem was I never had a Plan B - I was too old for a City job and would have been an awful teacher!
“I’d recommend going to Edinburgh to any other comedian. It’s a good thing that you don’t have to be at one of the main venues to win the Perrier. The judges will look at people they’ve never heard of in small, low-key places. And now that I have won, it’s ridiculous how completely my life has been transformed. It’s incredible that now I can get paid for what I’ve always wanted to do!”
Even though she is so appealingly self-effacing, Laura clearly deserved to pick up the prestigious comedy award. (In doing so, by the way, she became the first solo female Perrier victor since the wondrously raucous Jenny Eclair in 1995).
It’s a compelling show, a memorable marriage of deft writing and subtle performing. Playing a dizzying array of people - including a passionate aficionado of Andrew Lloyd Webber, a Australian divorcee taken over by the spirit of Diana, Princess of Wales, a grim Polish story-teller, a Rotherham wedding planner, a corporate executive who is inexplicably terrified of the Chinese, and a marketing assistant obliged to dress up a bookworm for a sales promotion (“for God’s sake, read more,” she wails, “people who do, know more words and live forever”). Laura underlines over the course of an absorbing and quite hilarious hour that she has few peers in the arena of character comedy.
Like the two artists to whom she has been compared, Victoria Wood and Alan Bennett (who reputedly sits on the top deck of buses surreptitiously noting down the chatter of his unwitting fellow travellers), Laura has an unerring ear for the dialogue of ordinary people. She also possesses the almost spooky knack of inhabiting their minds. All in all, it’s bravura stuff.
But don’t just take my word for it. The critics at Edinburgh were equally bowled over by her show originally named “Kopfraper’s Syndrome”. The name is a throwback to an entirely different show Laura was planning with another comedian - who unfortunately had to drop out for personal reasons three months before the Festival - when it was too late to change the title.
Chortle described Laura as “an immensely talented writer with performance skills to match”. For its part, The Times called the show “an astonishingly assured debut,” while The Guardian reckoned that “Solon’s twisted imagination means that the show is jam-packed with delights.”
What is so refreshing is Laura’s insistence on eschewing stereotypes - her characters are fresh-minted, figures you feel you have never seen depicted before on stage. They are “anti-clichés,” fully-rounded, living, breathing people whom you might meet at your local pub or Women’s Institute hall. They - and their creator - are utterly original.
Leaning back on the restaurant’s absurdly comfortable sofa, the comedian confirms that “what I’m interested in is realistic detail. I avoid social stereotypes. I want to conjure up unique, identifiably flawed characters, not mere clichés. I don’t go for the stressed banker or the gymkhana mum or the chav because they’ve all been done before. I want to create characters that people haven’t met before.”
Crucially, even though some of Laura’s characters are quite clearly a sandwich short of the full picnic, the comedian never sneers at them. Her portrayals are suffused with affection.
“None of my characters are high-status,” reflects Laura, who was brought up near Aylesbury and first started performing in revues while studying English at Oxford. “But they’re generally happy in their own worlds, and if you’re happy in your own world, you’re not pathetic. High-status people can be really cold and distancing. There’s not much to laugh about with them. I prefer comedy that’s warmer.”
Another strongpoint of Laura’s show - that it would be easy to underestimate - is the meticulousness of her writing. All her characters have been beautifully crafted on the page, before being vividly brought to life on stage. Marvellous lines such as “there’s only one thing worse than being talked about - and that’s Madrid” do not just pop out fully-formed off the cuff; they take a lot of honing.
“At school, I was quite methodical and analytical,” recalls Laura, who earned extra money before the Perrier triumph as a “not very good” temp, “and that’s how I approach comedy. It’s a careful process of fitting the right words into the right place.
“A joke won’t work so well if it contains too many syllables or the wrong rhythm. I spend a lot of time working on the script. I’m not someone who can come onstage without a script and make people laugh spontaneously.”
Yet this painstaking approach yields splendid results, such as the memorable sketch about the marketing assistant forced to wear a bookworm’s costume. “I like comedy to have some pathos to it - it’s wonderful to have two in one. If you start off getting a laugh in a sleeping bag and a pink hat, and then the sadness of your life is revealed and the audience feels sorry for you, that’s a very rich combination. I enjoy creating that contrast in tones. Mingling laughter and tears makes it much more believable.”
One of the reasons Laura so relishes working with characters is because they grant her the licence to say things she’d never get away with as herself. “You can say things in character that you’d never dare say as a straight stand-up,” she observes. “You can put a distance between yourself and your character, and that gives you tremendous freedom.”
Character comedy is hugely popular at the moment - look at the success of personae such as Al Murray’s Pub Landlord and Garth Marenghi - but Laura doesn’t think her show is part of a trend.
“Things do go in and out of fashion on television,” muses the comedian, a tall, elegant young woman dressed in a black cardigan and blue jeans, “but in the live arena people aren’t thinking ‘I’m laughing at this because it’s in vogue’ or ‘I won’t laugh at this because I laughed at in 1977.’
“Live comedy elicits the most direct and honest response from people - you can’t fool an audience. It’s nothing to do with whether it’s character comedy or straight stand-up - people will only laugh if it’s funny.”
And funny is certainly what Laura is - as you will see if you go to her show. But if you can’t make it along to the theatre, never fear; you will no doubt soon catch her in another medium. The comedian is currently working up a Radio 4 radio series for the BBC.
It means she is pretty frantic right now, but she doesn’t mind about that in the least. “I can’t complain about being busy,” Laura smiles, picking up one last chunk of sushi with her chopsticks. “I’d much rather be working than sitting at home all afternoon watching re-runs of Columbo!”
Laura Solon returns to Edinburgh for a one-off performance of her award winning 2005 show on 26th August at the Pleasance Courtyard.
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