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Isy Suttie review – charming comic on a wild childhood chase

When Isy Suttie was a girl in Matlock, Derbyshire, she always had “an urge to look for the jackpot in life … I never did anything by halves.” What do you do with that personality when you’re a middle-aged parent to two small children? That’s the subject of Suttie’s first touring show in six years – even if its focus gets fuzzy in the later stages. Whatever its gist, it’s a thoroughly likable confection, contrasting child-Isy and mum-Isy in a series of autobiographical anecdotes then – in classic mum fashion – popping all the show’s ingredients into a pot to cook up a pair of delicious songs too.

To begin with, Suttie, triggered by an overheard conversation between two carefree 12-year-olds, spirits us back to her childhood – leaping off bridges for a dare, shuttling between house parties, and cultivating her local notoriety as a queen of Ouija. Nothing is ever as intensely felt as our own youth, a point sharply made when Suttie contrasts her wild childhood with the conversations she now must endure with her cautious, surprise-averse other half. As the show progresses, though, the theme that coalesces isn’t her lost daredevilry, it’s her faith in the metaphysical. One pivotal scene finds Suttie under infant scrutiny when caught laying a Christmas stocking by her seven-year-old’s bed. Another conjures with signals her father may be sending her from beyond the grave.

Related: Isy Suttie: ‘I was like: are they just here to see Dobby?’

Lots of this rings emotionally true without always raising the comic temperature. The story about a recent midlife attempt to rediscover devil-may-care is a bit of a non-event – which is partly the point. A joke about her mum misremembering a book title feels arbitrary. But Suttie certainly hits the comic jackpot, and not for the first time, with her songs, which take the sometimes discordant elements of this hour’s standup (contact with the dead; appetite for life; sheep tumbling from the sky) and make sweet, daft music with them. It adds up to a charming show about a girl determined there be more to life than “boring Matlock” – or indeed the material realm – has to offer, and who, 30 years on, is still pursuing it.