Loretta Maine review

Loretta Maine, the singer with the feel-bad factor, is back in Edinburgh to spread her jaded-fairy magic via the medium of music. A mutant abomination from the swamps of Somewheresville, America; Loretta is an ungodly blend of Courtney Love, Carrie and Kathy Bates. With better songs, though.

It's creator Pippa Evans' third year at the Fringe, and the decision to shelve her other, equally disturbing characters in favour of a whole show devoted to Loretta Maine has proved savvy. We are a society that loves to rubber-neck at self-destructive, car crash females after all.

On paper, however, Loretta Maine really shouldn't work. A screeching, neurotic drunk played with the subtlety of a pantomime dame - and we've got sit through an hour of this? But even before she's arrived on stage, she's got the audience filling the cavernous venue with laughter. As the songs start and Loretta's boyfriend-pickling, nemesis stalking, Megabus pee-fight shenanigans unravel it's hard to resist her psychotic, needy charms.

Loretta may be a caricature, a grotesque, but I challenge any girl who has found herself, eyeliner smeared across her face, slumped on a toilet (or, say, Slough train station Platform 2), bawling down the phone at a voicemail inbox of a soon to be ex, to not recognise at least a glimmer of an inkling of themselves in Evans' monstrous songstress.

For all of Loretta's garishness, her charmingly underplayed, if gruesomely named, band Dog Vagina provides some balance. Christian drummer Tim and Shoreditch twat Jim get some of the biggest laughs with their tiny throwaway gestures. Cowed into submission - much like the terrorised front row - Dog Vagina give Loretta a much needed foil and hint at Loretta's offstage life. It's not much of a stretch to imagine Loretta in some kind of mockumentary style sitcom, and given that chance she may well prove to be this decade's Patsy Stone.

It's fair to say that Loretta Maine ain't everyone's cup of tea, but as the lady herself says, in that case you can just 'fuck off home'.

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Loretta Maine: I'm Not Drunk I Just Need To Talk To You listing