Fringe Binge 2017 Show #25 - Shappi Khorsandi - Mistress And Misfit; Assembly George Square Studios, 1840, 09-Aug-17

Ms. Khorsandi is something of (yet another) comedy heroine of mine. I've seen her several times (here, here and back in the dim dark days of 2014 when I didn't write things up) and she's fabulous. Her own personal history is well known - as she says "We were immigrants long before it became fashoinable" - so I won't repeat it.

This show is (loosely) based around the life of Lady Emma Hamilton, mistress and love of Lord Horatio Nelson, former wife of Lord Hamilton, muse for the famous painter George Romney, and a woman with quite the hard upbringing and extremely unfairly treated by the State, and subsequently history, after the death of Nelson. Fascinating woman ...

Anyway, on-stage Shappi was displaying a print of the most famous picture Romney painted of Lady Hamilton:

Ms. K kept coming back to this as the show was really about various snippets and incidents in her own life, comparing - when she remembered and wasn't joyfully sidetracking - with those of Lady Hamilton. Plenty of new anecdotes, such as the time she and her cousin visited Amsterdam and they met and were entertained by a rich American who she then slept with (Ms. K mused whether this made her a courtesan or prostitute), and being recognised by a stern Iranian midwife when she was giving birth who enthused over the poetry of Ms. K's Father. Plenty of others, all delivered in that trademark Shappi style of part Enid Blyton, part Princess Jasmine, part foul-mouthed Eastender.

She's wonderful and you can't go and see her enough.