Act like a standup: Cariad Lloyd's shapeshifting comedy in Edinburgh

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/aug/07/cariad-lloyd-comedy-standup-solo-shows-edinburgh

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The high-minded often complain that the fringe is now dominated by standup comedy – as if standup were this monolithic, anti-creative art form. It's not, nor ever has been. But it's striking how much more fluid it's becoming – and in particular how the artists, who you used to be able to confidently pin down as sketch comedians, standups or whatever, are now increasingly appearing in a variety of different guises.

A few years ago, the phenomenon manifested as sketch groups splintering into solo acts – Greg Davies sprang from We Are Klang, Cowards gave us Tim Key and Tom Basden. Thom Tuck and Edinburgh comedy award-winner Humphrey Ker seceded from the Penny Dreadfuls. These days, there's not necessarily any distinction in the first place. Is Liam Williams a standup or, with Sheeps, a sketch comic? Well, he's both, and has been right from the recent outset of his career. Pippa Evans is another comedy award-nominated comic who does standup, character comedy (in the guise of malevolent alt-country singer Loretta Maine), improv (she's in Showstoppers!) and indeed evangelical atheism, as one of the founders of the Sunday Assembly.

The other day I watched a show featuring the woman who represents the zenith of this trend, Cariad Lloyd. A former best newcomer nominee (for a solo character-comedy show), Lloyd is like the Edinburgh fringe in human form. She does solo shows. She stars in Austentatious, the very successful improvised Jane Austen format. This year, she's also in Cariad & Paul: A Two-Player (Improvised) Adventure, and in Cariad and Louise's Character Hour. Her sidekick, Louise Ford, is another shapeshifter: she was in a double act (Ford and Akram), then did a solo character hour (as Jenny Fawcett); now she's in another double act, shortly after acting in a West End show.

Theirs is a really enjoyable free fringe show, with a surfeit of larger-than-life characters who (as with Lloyd's 2011 solo debut) only barely conceal the fun-loving performer beneath. Ford's gurning Cara Delevingne piss-take was a highlight ("Actor, model – the list goes on …"), and I liked Lloyd's Jesus impersonator, Alan Lantern – you can book him in the run-up to your wedding to approve pre-marital sex. In the past, I'd have been looking forward by now to Cariad & Louise's next show. But these days, there's no way of knowing what type of comedy these artists will be presenting at next year's fringe, or in what new combinations they'll be presenting it.

Maybe that's about career development: you maximise your chance of success if you show you can do everything and work with anyone. But I get a stronger sense that it's a creative impulse, that a generation of comics have arrived who enjoy testing themselves and see minimal value in the distinctions between different modes of comedy. The comic and theatre-maker Will Adamsdale has repeatedly criticised "[the] emphasis on the difference between things – between comedy and theatre, for example." He refuses to acknowledge those differences – and the acts who've emerged in his wake are taking that logic to the next level. As Cara Delevingne might say: "standup, sketch act, character comic, improviser – the list goes on …" – and it's exciting for comedy that it does so.