Guilt Free: Self-assuredly sultry and hysterically eccentric – a character comedy show bursting with gusto (Fringe review) 5 Stars *****

Writer-performer Maddie Silverstein serves up a full course of delectable skits linked more by cohesive themes than overarching narrative. She first introduces us to Christie Mitchell, a crack infomercialist so far ‘ahead of medical science’ that she’s dropped 100% of her body (fat) by turning into a hologram. We then meet Miss Susan, a WeightWatchers Coach and serial Nando’s arsonist who serves a larger shadowy organisation headed up by Oprah.

Finally, we encounter the nameless acolyte of a cult who eat only air and almonds, and count Gwyneth Paltrow within their star-studded ranks. Each character is both a personification of a particular aspect of diet culture and a fleshed-out individual persona. Christie Mitchell’s habit of simultaneously smoking as many cigarettes as will fit in her hands, for example, packs in so much personality. But it’s also a quietly hilarious critique of diet culture’s tendency to betray its own claims of concern for people’s health, repeatedly pushing treatments far more harmful than body fat could ever be. 

And Silverstein embodies her characters with magnetic discipline. From her bodacious, gyrating stage-entrance as Mitchell to her closing goblin-mode wander through the audience as the erratic cult acolyte, Silverstein does not so much as take one out-of-character breath. It’s not just comedy skits, either – between Miss Susan leading the audience in choral song expressing her desire for a calorie-neutralising tapeworm (let me hear you say “P-A-R-A-S-I-T-E”, everybody) and Silverstein’s interpretive dance from the perspective of body fat Ozempic-ed away, Guilt Free is truly all-singing and all-dancing. Its emotional heart, though, lies in the home videos of Silverstein’s childhood self that cleanse our palette between skits.

To see nine-year-old Maddie – already being subjected to WeightWatchers, and almost as bizarrely, already making parody infomercials – on stage with adult Silverstein is to understand the show. Whatever Silverstein may have lost in her years-long battle with diet culture that forms Guilt Free’s material, it certainly wasn’t her ability to have bold, tremendous fun at its expense.

Guilt Free, Just The Snifter Room at Just The Tonic at The Mash House, 20th till 30th August