Rachel Parris review – the smiling assassin gets up close and personal
Rachel Parris always knew this might be a show with an identity crisis. Having plied her trade for 10 years as a musical comic, crooning about her personal life, she then found fame as a satirist – her tart Mash Report sketches were watched by millions. All Change Please was created in early 2020 to bridge that divide – or as Parris has it: “The show was originally going to be about me going viral.” But Covid-19, and life, had other ideas. Now Parris arrives in Edinburgh with an hour that must account for her new marriage and parenthood too.
That’s a lot to pack in, and I suspect Parris manages better to do so in the version of All Change Please that has recently been touring. Here, the shock – clearly considerable – of her newfound fame is raised and dispatched, a little unsatisfyingly, in one 20-second song. And the political material is given fairly short shrift. The wisecracks about Williamson, Hancock, Patel and co hit their Mash Report marks, mind you, and there’s a fine gag about how toadying Tory loyalty to Boris Johnson has alienated Parris from loyalty altogether.
More of the show addresses Parris’s newly married life, a culture-clash experience (she classifies her husband as posh) through which she has acquired a bigger house, stepchildren – and now a baby of her own. Her efforts to conceive are spun into a running musical joke sending up the sexlessness of “trying for a baby”, and her teen stepdaughter prompts a riff on changing makeup styles. The house move is commemorated with a musical inventory listing the domestic detritus (“more than one glockenspiel, less than one Le Creuset”) that Parris contributed to cohabitation in exchange for her new four-bedroom home.
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In a show that finds Parris’s trademark smiling-assassin style present and correct, but softened a little by self-deprecation, the best material is the most personal. Riffs on skiing and speedy boarding feel generic by contrast. If one wishes the show’s fringe edit had more space to accommodate Parris’s proliferating roles in life, at least it proves that, in the whirligig of change, her comic talent has not deserted her.
At Underbelly, George Square, Edinburgh, until 13 August.
