“Her magic, her artistry, is to spotlight the universal in the deeply personal.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

Eureka! I’ve found gold. Panning through the Free Fringe at Banshee Labyrinth I’ve found a performer I can boast about having seen before she was the megastar of EdFringe’s yet to come. A combination of poetry and spoken word, ‘Life Learnings of a Nonsensical Human’ brings together all the elements necessary for a truly memorable Fringe happening.

Jenny Foulds is a queer performance poet, writer and actress from Scotland. Jenny was the 2021 Scottish Poetry Slam Champion and was a finalist in the World Slam Championships in 2022, as well as being host and curator of the Brighton-based spoken word night ‘Rebel Soapbox’. She is also the owner of ADHD and Dyslexia which might be the names of the winged horses with which she races this chariot across sixty minutes of tightly packed, beautifully cut material. If Dior made Fringe shows, they couldn’t hang this well or more elegantly.

The contours revealed are of a life well lived often in high gear. This is a show of three halves. The first deals with Foulds’ coming out story. I’m happy to say we are hearing lots of these in our more enlightened age. However, few flip the script quite so artfully. In narrating this most inner of journeys, Foulds focuses on those outer elements she encountered, focusing on the scene, the community, the support, the love she discovered. Her magic, her artistry, is to spotlight the universal in the deeply personal. The effect on the audience is electric. We are gripped. We are caressed. We are spellbound.

The second half is an unapologetic nostalgia narrative recalling the raves and parties of Foulds’ younger days. I’m exhausted just hearing about it. Life is for living but some live more than others, treating each day as an orange from which to squeeze the maximum juice. If you can put all that into poetry and inspire an auld crustie like me, you’re doing something right, in fact, you’re doing something marvellous.

The third half is where Foulds takes us into hyperspace. It’s a grief chronicle, about the loss of her beloved father. What a character he must have been. We never got to meet him, but we cannot help but admire his reflection in her. Foulds struggled to find herself, but in telling the tale of how she did, she never once loses pace, never once hits the target anywhere but dead centre. There is nothing macabre or gothic, nothing maudlin. It’s an open-eyed open-heart surgery not of recovery, we don’t recover from grief, but of rehabilitation which is a lifelong process. For several in the audience, evidently bearing the weight of their own griefs and losses, the healing (or at least helping) properties of Foulds’ words are obvious and plain to see. I’m a father which has taught me how little I know. But of the few things of which I can be certain is that Foulds’ Dad would be incredibly proud of this show.

The immediate, everyone-all-at-once standing ovation confirms that this is the show you will be boasting about having seen before it went interstellar. Come for the performer, stay for the performance, get your Dior oblique down coats on and go see this!

ALL our recent coverage? Click here!