Laura Lexx: Yo-Yo – Blackfriars, Glasgow

Sharing her worries and fears with a candid urgency, Laura Lexx makes you feel slightly complicit in them.

Not only does she remain excellent at crowd work, nimbly sparking off several points of contact in the audience, establishing temporary but robust relationships and narratives in her introductory section that she can play off throughout the main thrust of the show.

But she also really conveys the juggle, the angst of being a wife and mother to a young child whilst also a touring stand-up. Performing in Australia, snatching a date night on the road with her comic husband in a rare window their respective schedules overlap, these moments need to count for something, the stakes high.

Her marriage is not without its issues and she’s using the stage to vent. Stand-up is her release. But the time it demands that she spends in her head nurtures and brings her nagging doubts to the fore.

However, while she’s a real ball of anxiety, her compact, “dense” frame one of the few observations about her body that she relates without too much insecurity, she’s truly got the knack of making her frazzedlness relatable, impactful without overwhelming.

When she witheringly dismantles the process of getting a doctor’s appointment, she’s striking a blow for everyone frustrated by this imperfect system. When she opens by relating the battering her self-esteem has taken from her daughter, she’s establishing common ground with every parent while reassuring you that few have absorbed the hit as hard as she has.

The “kids say the funniest things” strand of stand-up can be wretched. But she affords her child an unknowingly crushing cruelty in her innocent, offhand remarks. Lexx is quick, chatty and endearingly shares her open wounds with a streak of self-deprecation a mile wide, her gynaecological issues a long-running nightmare that she skilfully turns into entertaining anecdote. Yet there remains an underlying despair to her.

Whether struggling to process her feelings toward her hot young Australian personal trainer, or reeling off her icks about her husband, you never truly think their relationship is in trouble. But you viscerally feel the micro-assaults she takes daily to her mental health.

Thankfully, love just about conquers all. And Lexx’s excessive mental load means that she’s considered her routines from just about every angle. This affords a sense of realness to them even as she takes them in distinct, original directions, exploring what her unwillingness to take Ozempic means and her shifting relationship to her stubbornness that she’s inherited from her father. She might be forever yo-yoing in her head but professionally at least, Lexx is on an upward swing right now.