Moscow Love Story/Polly and Esther
Sherman Theatre, Cardiff

TWO drag acts, Polly and Esther (★★★★), trying out their material in Cardiff before they head to the Edinburgh Fringe was an absolute joyous evening at the Sherman Theatre.

Twm Bollen-Molloy and Luke Hereford are Polly Amorous and Esther Parade and the evening starts with two cloaked and darkened figures talking to each other like macabre sister witches from Macbeth.

The conceit is that they will use magic to help a poorly performing drag act. This hilarious proposition means all the action takes place in front and behind a small curtained screen decked out as a cramped dressing room.

This morphs into a mother and daughter drag duo with Polly and Esther singing superbly and showing off their comedy chops as they navigate chosen family, adolescence and villainous low-fat yogurt-based probiotic gut health brands.

The pair had the audience in stitches as they come to the realisation that the corporation behind the yogurt-based probiotic drink they are promoting is a bad thing.

Paul Jenkins’s Moscow Love Story (★) is a very different kettle of fish as we are taken through the ramblings of a 2001 love story with Russia.

Interspersed with audio diaries played on a cassette player, this one-man show is billed as an untamed exploration of love and memory, paralleling personal boundaries with geopolitics in a world on the brink of transformation.

But in reality it is middle-class nonsense dressed up as erudition and is the drunken memories of a man who seems not to have understood Russia at all.

Any sympathy I had with the conceit of this unfunny confection was destroyed by the revelation that Jenkins and his English girlfriend in Russia had desecrated a Soviet war memorial to the 27 million who gave their lives to save Europe from fascism. Not content with telling us that the drunken pair had cooked sausages on the eternal flame, Jenkins asks if there are any Russians in the theatre before telling us the depraved couple extinguished the flame by urinating on it.

An unedifying and unfunny comedy.

Polly and Esther runs from July 31 until August 26; Moscow Love Story runs from August 15 to August 26, both at at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Festival Fringe.