Exemplified, perhaps, by her admission of owning “the world’s most powerful vibrator” and her fascinated horror with the instrument, Ania Magliano’s confessions have an especially candid and cheerily self-exploratory character.
Despite her parents’ divorce when she was four, suspicion of marriage and her greedy interest in the juicy details of a break-up, celebrity or otherwise, the comic has lately committed to her boyfriend moving in with her. And it has not been plain sailing.
With her easy, anecdotal style, Magliano relates the teething troubles in the relationship with a finely pitched mix of endearing, self-lacerating wit and smilingly tongue-in-cheek, absolute backing to her more unreasonable and inexplicable behaviour. The patience and understanding of her partner operates as a kind of background hum of steadiness to her considerable peculiarities and more capricious mood swings.
Gradually though, Magliano comes to the conclusion that something else is going on. By far her longest relationship has actually been with her hormonal contraceptive coil. But through breakups with both men and women, she’s not kept strong tabs on it in recent years. And she starts to wonder if it’s destabilising her emotionally.
Unabashedly, vividly and entertainingly, Magliano conveys the intimate and sometimes embarrassing procedures she has since experienced in the care of the NHS, in an escalating account of medical professionals having a rummage, scratching their heads and passing her along the chain to more specialist colleagues.
That the stand-up is prepared to lay quite so much of herself out there comes as no surprise, given the wry, open manner in which she begins Forgive Me, Father by admitting to cyberstalking exes and her boyfriend’s former partner, a masochistic habit that she makes sound like a charming and relatable quirk. And lest any men in the crowd find themselves disengaging from any of the gynaecological detail, she occasionally, sardonically drops in a snippet of sport trivia, just to keep them onside.
The underlying cause for her problems that Magliano ultimately arrives at won’t startle any wannabe amateur psychiatrists. But that’s in large part due to the way that she’s carefully seeded her tale, scarcely hiding her psychosexual issues in the plain sight of her anecdotes, but having the ribaldry and self-sabotage of her mildly chaotic life steals focus.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. And Forgive Me, Father is wonderfully paced and sustained, as she makes light and foolish of things that unquestionably could have been darker and heavier in less accomplished storytelling hands.
Tours until 10 April 2025 | Image: Contributed
The Reviews Hub Score
Cheerily candid confessions
