Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Super Mama
Solveiga Bake
Genre: Comedy, Solo Performance, Stand-Up
Venue: C alto Quaker Meeting house 40
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Super Mama is a love letter to exhausted parents and anyone who has forgotten how to laugh, from a young mum who is still surprised at the onslaught on your life that your first baby brings with it.
Review
Solveiga greets her audience in person upstairs at the Quaker Meeting House up more stairs from Waverley Station than anyone has walked on a daily basis who is not native to Edinburgh. She shakes hands, the person who is supposed to check your tickets has gone awol for a moment, it is a very personal start to a stand-up show. Solveiga is from Lithuania and three of her compatriots have come to see her show, there are ten of us in total. We find out soon why Solveiga is so personally happy to see us, this is her third evening but her first with anyone actually showing up. She wears shiny red boots and a fluffy red jacket, as we find out because her husband told her she was not warm enough anymore.
Her stand-up style is still a bit hesitant, English is not her first language and nerves sometimes get the better of her. Some jokes work very well, a delivery room professional in the audience laughs very happily at some of the more graphic descriptions of labour. Some of the joys of having an obstreperous toddler are shared with feeling and the only other mother in the room is left wondering whether Solveiga’s beautiful descriptions of her daily battles and the sometimes annoying, amusing or even sad changes in her life due to quiet sex and socks on hands rather than feet will turn all the young members in the audience off ever contemplating starting a family themselves.
Beautiful moments arrive when Solveiga picks up her ukulele and sings her own gentle lyrics to well known pop songs. Her voice is pure and she sings with a lovely earnestness. The last moments of her show are a very honest description of the love she feels for her daughter and you wish her well on her journey that started with taking acting lessons as a way of getting a bit of me-time away from the bairn and has now taken her all the way to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she plays to 10 people on her third night and misses the little one terribly.
