Venue: Edinburgh Festival
Edinburgh
Dates:2026
FERAL is performed by Jess Fuchs. Jess Fuchs is funny. Properly funny. The kind of funny that comes from recognising yourself, your friends, your family and probably several people you would rather not recognise yourself in.
In FERAL, Fuchs brings together a collection of personal stories, observations and wonderfully sharp comic material, weaving them into an hour that feels both extremely personal and completely relatable. There is an ease to her storytelling that makes you feel as though you have been let in on the joke and then she finds another joke underneath it.
Fuchs isn’t simply delivering a series of gags; she has a gift for taking the stuff of ordinary life and finding the absurdity hiding inside it. Small moments become stories, stories become beautifully constructed comic set pieces, and just when you think you know where she is going, she takes a deliciously unexpected turn.
There are some genuinely memorable (and painful) personal stories here. They stay with you because they aren’t simply vehicles for jokes, they have character, specificity and enough truth in them to make the comedy land harder. Fuchs has that increasingly rare ability to make an audience laugh while also thinking, oh God, yes, I know exactly what she means.
And she has comic genius. Not the grandstanding, look-at-me kind, but the kind that seems to come naturally from a performer who knows precisely how to tell a story, when to hold a beat and when to go for the punchline. Her timing is excellent, and there is a lovely sense of mischief running through the whole thing.
Also: the frock.
I loved Jess Fuchs’s frock. It deserves its own mention because it is fabulous, and because there is something wonderfully reassuring about a comedian who understands that what you wear is part of the storytelling. It suits the whole enterprise: funny, big, confident, outrageous and entirely herself.
There is nothing especially complicated about the proposition here. Fuchs gets onstage and tells us stories about being a person in the world. But the simplicity is deceptive. Good stand-up requires enormous skill, and FERAL demonstrates just how much craft goes into making an audience feel that someone is simply chatting to them.
This is also one of those shows where the time slot works beautifully. 6.55pm is a great Fringe time late enough to have got yourself properly into the day, early enough that you can still go out afterwards and continue the evening. And FERAL is exactly the sort of show you want in that slot: funny, warm, energetic and a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an hour. It’s really human and the Irish holiday, Titanic and the coccyx story are gold Go see it. It is a great time slot, a great show, and Jess Fuchs is a comedian worth remembering.
Kate Gaul, Theatre Now
