There's a lot riding on Laura Solon's new Fringe show. Having swept to surprise success in the Perrier Awards four years ago with her first outing here, a below-the-radar sketch show performed in the back room of a pub, she's gone on to make a popular Radio 4 series and also co-write and perform in a less high-achieving ITV2 series. But whilst she's had more success, more quickly, than she can possibly have hoped for as a result of that tentative first step into the comedy world, her career is still budding, and comics don't tend to stay in the limelight for long unless they keep a profile at what's become the world's largest comedy trade fair.
To her credit, Solon has not taken the lazy option of retreading old ground, deciding this time to frame her brand of whimsical, surreal but surprisingly sharp-edged social satire within a writerly plot, rather than a series of short skits. This seems to have helped her avoid a lot of the pitfalls of Fringe sketch comedy, which tends too often towards the overly 'random' - a mythical animal sketch here, a mock-up of a famous pop song there, nothing much in the way of substance.
By contrast, Rabbit Face Story Soup is tightly structured and thrillingly, almost bewilderingly dense. The story centres on Diana Lewis, assistant to a high-powered and inhumanly barbaric literary agent whose star author, a penner of post-apocalyptic sci-fi thrillers inspired by experience at Harrogate Borough Council, has just gone missing before writing the final chapter of her latest blockbuster. Solon bounds around the stage and contorts her short, slight frame and Home Counties accent to play all the characters, from the permanently hunched and angry American agent Marcie Blitzer, to the fat, aristocratic and patricarchal publisher Sir Michael Black.
It's superbly written, incorporating a seemingly endless stream of intelligently surreal imagery and unexpected collisions of ideas that frequently brings to mind the work of Douglas Adams. Having become a darling of Radio 4, she's gathered a loyal following of middle-aged admirers who dominate the audience and lap up such consummate artistry; although one can't help feeling this is a mixed blessing, as Solon does occasionally, and quite brilliantly, stray into scatalogical and grotesque areas that seem to leave some of this crowd behind. Every so often the limits of her abilities as a performer are tested too far by her own, very demanding script - some of the accents run together and the definition between a few of the characters isn't quite as strong as might be hoped.
But these are minor quibbles with a show that delivers some of the most satisfying narrative and comic punches that I've seen at the Festival this year. It would almost be advisable to go twice just to catch all of the comic detail that's packed in here, as well as to appreciate once more the surprisingly touching relationship that develops between a woman and a dead rabbit. The radio and TV offers should come flowing in again on the strength of this show, but let's hope this doesn't mean Solon denies us the pleasure of seeing her live at Fringes to come.
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