With Fringe reviews, there is always the rush to get thoughts down before the memory fades, a kind of premature evaluation, if you will. It raises the age-old questions: am I swayed by recency bias? Should I check what others think before I commit? But Ben Pope’s The Cut does not need that second-guessing; it stays with you, start to finish, like a story you do not just remember, but feel.
Even the title Ben Pope: The Cut carries a sly humor—at first, you might wonder if you’re about to hear tales of Pope Benedict and his holy private parts. Pope playfully toys with this confusion, fully aware he may never reach the papal heights of his name twin. But with a show this sharp, and a review this glowing, perhaps that’s about to change. And, yes, please do not fear, there are more than enough dick jokes to go around in this hour. Pope gleefully lets us in on the tale of his “big surgery”: a circumcision. The set is laced with puns sharper than the scalpel, but the brilliance lies in how he uses this physical… edit… as a springboard into something far deeper.
What elevates The Cut is Pope’s level of storytelling. Amicable and effortlessly personable, he opens up about not just his most physically vulnerable side (or should I say, area), but his emotional one too, talking about his relationship and his family. There was a moment near the end of the show, long and unbroken, when the audience fell silent. Not from boredom, but because we were utterly hooked, holding on to every word. It is rare to feel that in a comedy room, rarer still when it follows jokes about your foreskin.
As his poster hints, this is not just a show about loss in the most literal sense. It is about the delicate, symbiotic relationship between comedy and tragedy, and how one can ease the weight of the other. Pope proves that a well-placed laugh does not undercut pain; it makes it bearable, even beautiful.
There are a few tiny hesitations, small moments of uncertainty, but they barely graze the surface of an otherwise smart, warm, and wonderfully human performance. In The Cut, Pope shows that great comedy is not just about going for the cheap gag, it is about knowing when to pull back, and when to let it all hang out.
Ben Pope: The Cut is running until 24 August (not 13) at The Box at Assembly George Square.
Buy tickets here.
Image courtesy of Mark Jones, provided to The Student as press material.