Playbill Pick Review: Laura Davis’ Albatross at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Playbill Pick Review: Laura Davis’ Albatross at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe

What if the empty black void of the unknown wasn’t something to be feared, but a friend?

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world, with over 3,700 shows. This year, Playbill is on board our FringeShip for the festival and we’re taking you with us. Follow along as we cover every single aspect of the Fringe, aka our real-life Brigadoon!

As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we’re letting you know what we think of them. Consider these reviews a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.

“A lot of people consider comedy an art, or a craft,” Laura Davis states at the top of their 12th Edinburgh Fringe show, Albatross. “I consider it a sport. Fringe is the deadlift.”

Nestled in the back of Monkey Barrel, down the steep hill of Blair Street only a stones throw from the raucous activity of South Bridge, Davis is opening up space for a productive existential crisis. As the empty black void of the unknown creeps into just about every aspect of daily life, Davis’s profoundly capable hands twist the expected narrative such emptiness usually demands. They put forward a silent question: What if the unknown wasn’t something to be feared, but a friend?

You may not know Davis’ name, but you almost certainly know their comedy. Australian born and bred, Davis is regularly referred to as a “comic’s comic” (a term they dislike), known for the inspiration and influence they have wielded throughout the scene. In fact, Davis’ work is stolen, wholesale, by more public facing comedians, on a fairly regular basis. While some may cry that imitation is a sincere form of flattery, it becomes clear when witnessing Davis perform their own work that pale imitations are profoundly unworthy when compared to the real thing.

Confession time: Davis was not originally on my review radar. For all their brilliance, louder (and often less interesting) comics often out-market Davis, whose work clearly thrives on the power of word of mouth. I first witnessed Davis at this year’s edition of 2023 Playbill favorite The Kaye Hole, where their tight mini set had the room positively gasping. With a sly smirk and the kind of comedic timing that brings to mind Norm Macdonald, Davis is the kind of comic that leaves me scrambling to write down their information in a darkened theatre, not wanting to forget even a second of the experience.

But back to Albatross. The large seabird, native to the Southern Ocean and North Pacific, are massive, with wingspans regularly crossing 10 feet. Covering great distances with little exertion, the albatross can fly nearly 1,000 kilometers from a single flap of their wings, gliding over great expanses of ocean. An avian aficionado, Davis frequently finds themselves watching the Cornell Lab Bird Cam, which silently broadcasts the early life of baby albatrosses from a safe nesting ground. Born tiny and fluff covered, with a long neck and grey features that look more at home with a desaturated plush toy than a living animal, their first moment of flight comes without preamble, hurling themselves off a cliff in an act of genetic trust without so much as a trial run on the stable ground.

“What is going on in its head before it throws itself off the cliff for the first time?” Davis wonders. And what is going to happen to humanity as we inch ever closer to our own ecological cliff.

Now living in Edinburgh, Davis is spending a lot of time with birds. A sell proclaimed “nibble witch” who has managed to train local gulls to serve as their protective gang when out and about, Davis is the first in their family line to not pursue a career as a commercial fisherman (although they’ve kept the haunted old sea captain aura). In many ways, it seems the haunted aspect is at the forefront these days.

When walking the coast of Fife, Davis stumbled upon a disturbing sight: over a hundred dead birds, washed against the rocky beach like a biblically bad omen. A painting, of a man furiously bailing water out of a sinking boat with a storm rumbling on the horizon, arrests Davis’s vision. And of course, there’s the haunted microwave.

Davis’s punchlines far outweigh anything I could write down here, and I won’t cheat you of the experience by sketching out a vague facsimile. But, at a recent performance, as Davis reflects on the enveloping silence of an empty horizon, gazing directly into the darkness—a steadying silence washed over the crowd, a moment of communal connection with no clear conclusion.

That is comedy at its finest.

Laura Davis: Albatross runs at Monkey Barrel through August 25. Click here for tickets.