Erin McGathy @ Gilded Balloon, Counting House
A charming debut that unfortunately doesn't serve the whole hour with the same level of quality.
It's hard not to a little bit in love with Erin McGathy as she bares her romantic soul to a crowd of strangers in the Counting House. McGathy’s first Edinburgh hour is a journey through her love life, for better or worse, taking in teenage fan fiction and pupil-teacher relationships all the way to an extravagant wedding plan for a doomed relationship.
She is an able storyteller with an acute ear for crowd reaction and improvisation, and she deftly handles some overzealous audience particpation while a sympathetic room gives her the attention her stories mostly deserve. What starts well, however, starts to sag in the latter half of the show as her tales start to warrant less and less attention – as the stories pile up, the comedy doesn’t and all too often it feels like we’re simply hearing entries from the diary of a lovestruck teen. There’s humour inherent to many of these tales but a more innovative structural approach may have been needed for the material to really flourish.
A set piece ending is appropriately bittersweet but falls a little flat in this instance – a shame, as there’s a lot to like here but Love You Loudly is missing the spark to set it apart.
Erin McGathy: Love You Loudly, Gilded Balloon at the Counting House: Ballroom, 3-29 Aug, 2pm, £5 / PWYW