Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Austentatious
Show and Tell
Genre: Comedy, Improvised Theatre
Venue: Underbelly
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A venerable Fringe institution, Austentatious still glitters with comic gems and dazzles with its performers’ inventiveness.
Review
Austentatious is, of course, a juggernaut. The “Austen scholar” who introduces the show jokes that the novelist’s first submission to the Fringe was in 1785, and it feels like a crack that could be made about Austentatious itself. It’s been running for long enough that a babe in arms at its first performances could soon be babysitting for the next generation of fans. Thus, this review is less “but what is it like?” and more “how is it holding up?” The answer, in a word, is well: but perhaps with some need of a refresh.
The formula will by now be familiar: the audience suggests challenging titles, which on the day I attended included “Mould & Rentability” and “Gay-curious & Furious” before the cast picks one – which, on my visit, was “Bitches in Britches.”
Even more than with most improv, the idea here is modularity rather than entirely free-form invention. The six players (plus a musician who possibly has the hardest job of all) clearly draw upon a shared library of extensive Austen tropes and a toolbox of devices, from callbacks to gross-outs, to construct semi-standalone scenes that contribute – somewhat shaggily – to a grand arc.
These well-worn blocks form the bulk of the story and are pleasant enough, in their zany and goodnatured way, but they’re the background against which the truly invented content – the puns and plot-specific zingers – shine. The cast are uniformly brilliant when it comes to lobbing these scintillating wit grenades into the dialogue, and truly astonishing in their speed of invention.
The company resist the easy route of mere joke-telling and aim instead for satire of the genre as a whole. This doesn’t quite succeed as well, but does have the probably unintended effect of inviting the audience to consider: what exactly constitutes a Regency Romance, anyway? The players’ attempts to distill it into its essential elements for rapid reassembly around a new theme inevitably fails to capture the magic at the heart of Austen’s best writing, but their ambition adds an interesting gravity to their antics.
More urgently in need of a reassessment is the way in which the world has changed since the show first launched. The production carefully, somewhat pointedly, avoids sexist and homophobic jokes, but ones that derive their humour from focusing on the grossness of old people are apparently granted a rather jarring exception. It may be time to revisit this.
Though the capering sometimes devolves into mugging and the jokes can be broad, the enterprise remains essentially fresh even as it verges on becoming an institution. Austentatious remains a very solid hour of good fun.
