Presented by Lee Minora

Review by Esme Hallworth

TechCube 0 at Summerhall

Another chill day-off in the life of hyperactive, hyper-anxious, hypochondriac Baby who must contend with heated phone debates with her mother, the crushing weight of the state of global politics and infinite self-diagnoses. Keep calm and carry on but don’t forget to check for lumps whilst you’re at it. Writer and performer Lee Minora is a magic porridge pot of energy and angst, delivering lines of desperation with a Disney-fied tone and possessing of a magnetism that wastes no time in seducing the audience into easy laughter. In truth, anguish comes as easy as the laughter for behind the big smiles there is much more than a simple comedy.

Over the hour, audience members are made to consider their own stances on the state of the world whilst being called on to help her with her ablutions with comically sized cosmetic items and later administer a breast examination with extendable tiny hands. These are moments where the angst steps can aside and absurdity is allowed to bathe in the spotlight. However, the glare of Baby’s phone produces a different spotlight of its own, blinding and entrancing her between breast examinations and art museum tours. Minora enacts a real-life doom scroll with a dizzying whiplash of videos where every emotion on the spectrum evoked, quashed, re-evoked in one fell swoop.

Confrontational, overstimulating and just really very funny, this is an exaggerated yet somehow painfully accurate representation of an individual’s attempt to remain positive amidst never-ending swathes of bad news from the media. One woman, one hour and lots and lots of big questions. Do we, or can we, break the loop of optimism, desperation and denial? If we can, how do we reconcile an appreciation for what we have alongside everything that remains so wrong with the world? This a well-structured, somehow both coherent and chaotic hour of reckoning with the reality that nothing has been worse or better than it is right now.

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