With no set audience demographic for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, it is perhaps a risky business to base most of your act not only on audience participation, but also the art of making connections with them. Don’t mention that to Stephen K Amos though, whose Fringe show sets out to examine exactly that.
A warm-up comic for ‘Have I Got News For You’ and ‘V Graham Norton’, Amos is obviously used to dealing with audiences. His strength lies in picking up on reactions and exploiting them, to the cost of whichever crowd member has been foolish enough to provide him with ammunition. For the most part this works, although one gentleman from Australia didn’t seem to be enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame in the Amos’ spotlight.
Amos’ examination of making connections with people, along with the reactions he receives from different social stereotypes, takes him all around the world, from Aviemore to Sydney and back again via South Africa. Along the way he develops a number of different identifiable personas, both to strengthen his tales and to further humiliate the audience. The culmination of the act is a dance routine to a well-known 80’s hit (I won’t spoil the surprise), which will take anyone over the age of 21 hurtling back in time.
Amos has enough talent to suggest that a bigger stage beckons. A fifty-minute show stifles him to a certain extent, where a longer show might have allowed the momentum to continue to greater comic heights. Definitely a name to look out for.
3/5
Martin Dewar
