Ladykiller (Pleasance Courtyard: 3-27 Aug: 13:00: 60 mins)

“Evokes the absolute best of bloodthirsty entertainment.”

Why is it the darkest thoughts so often provide the funniest gags? From legendary one-liners (“I’m having an old friend for dinner”) to literary works (calling J. Swift) to entire theatrical movements (the Grand Guignol made this their bread and butter for over 60 years), the most twisted material has consistently charmed audiences throughout centuries of culture. Writer Madeline Gould, making her Fringe debut with one-woman show Ladykiller, appears to fully understand how fruitfully funny and fascinating the macabre can be, and has created a delightful exploration of a particularly bloodthirsty protagonist, played with captivating energy by Northern Irish actress Hannah MacClean. Director Madeleine Moore provides deft, minimalist direction, which provides some splendidly gripping moments and risible humour for the most part — with a slight tightening of the meanderings of the show, Gould’s piece could be a serious golden goose in the Gripping Female Monologues canon.

Ladykiller veers from the dramatic to the iconoclastic to the squeamishly depraved with breakneck speed, which results in both well-timed tone shifts and some narrative whiplash. The piece opens with a body on the floor — as so many excellent things do — and a wide-eyed hotel maid covered in a remarkable amount of viscera and trembling with disbelief and regret. She delivers a heartfelt, hopeless, victimised plea to the darkened audience, and perhaps to a higher judgement, insisting that she would never commit such a heinous act without provocation, and proceeds to desperately lay out how exactly she wound up holding the knife and the deceased wound up deceased. This opener soon slides towards the melodramatic, which ultimately serves Gould’s approach excellently, for MacClean cathartically reels it all back in to explain why we’re really sitting through an hour of this blood-splattered protagonist. For the maid is not at all as she appears, much less a gain-based killer, (simply killing to protect herself), but rather one of the myriad more complex and captivating types of murderer. Over the course of Ladykiller, the maid not only lays out her favourite and most revered killers and killer types, but explains various methods and methodologies in great, gruesome detail.

In truth, though Ladykiller is frequently very funny — mainly owing to MacClean’s masterful grip on comic timing and goading of the audience — though its subject matter gets possibly too worshipful of the ‘art’ of murder to leave a nice taste. This ought not to be at the front of anyone’s mind going to see a show with quite such a blood-soaked poster, but the casual references to legendary serial killers and their unthinkable deeds start to drift from explanation to hagiography, yet without enough consistency to hold together quite right. The history lesson segments of the piece are at once both too brief to leave a firm impact (unless you too have memorised the gamut of notorious murderers so well you can recall their significance instantaneously) and too long-winded to convince a newcomer to jump aboard the murderer hype train.

Of course, to a certain extent, the intricacies of murder psychology are reliably fascinating, and Gould has done well to document them so extensively; perhaps some more character work on the maid and her preferences within murder scholarship would make the piece seem less like a TED talk at times. That being said, MacClean is an enthralling presence onstage, with a fabulously personable way of engaging with words and tone. The way the words “students,” or “intellectual masturbation,” or “femininity” slither out of her grinning teeth evokes the absolute best of bloodthirsty entertainment, and rest assured, no matter the subject matter, MacClean’s delivery keeps the audience in good hands the whole way through.

The notion of femininity and its relation to all this is a fascinating undercurrent in Ladykiller, and Gould has included some excellent meditations on how the gender of the killer (or killed) affects understandings of power, victimhood, and responsibility. There are excellent points made concerning why female killers are automatically considered less crafty or intentional than male ones, and even whether these assumptions ultimately enable female murderers more than anything. These questions are excellent fodder for further consideration, and though Ladykiller has its uneven elements, if you are looking for some violent delights delivered by a knockout leading woman, look no further.