1000 Tiny Birds

Julia Masli - ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Monkey Barrel, 2023-08-13

One of my non-full-show favourite things from last year’s Fringe was Julia Masli’s spot at Terrible Wonderful Adaptations, an eye wateringly funny bit of clowning that sustained itself in a full hour I later went to in London. This year, though, she’s moved on from a broad but discernible narrative show to “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha”, an audience interaction heavy fever dream. Wandering the audience with a microphone on a mannequin leg for an arm, she asks the audience their problems in deliberate broken English and (native) Eastern European accent (“…problem?”) and presumes to solve them. This is a masterful hour of clowning, but despite (because of?) that, she’s actually quite effective. A man is homeless and looking for a room in London; she asks the audience who lives in London, and soon another audience member looking for a roommate is swapping numbers with him. Another man has a cough, and an audience member runs from the back with a pack of cough sweets for him. At some points, with a man who misses his mum and another whose grandma has Parkinson’s, Masli manages to make it deeply poignant. A genuinely remarkable hour and an absolute Fringe special.