Having seen comedians at the Fringe display insecurity whenever a particular punchline doesn’t land with everyone in the audience on the night, it’s refreshing to come across Davina Bentley, who insisted she was going to keep the jokes we didn’t laugh at anyway. Well, she should, and so should most comedians, actually, because unless the comedy set is wholly and entirely a series of standalone one-liners, it’s likely one joke is connected to another, which itself is connected to another (and so forth), so any pruning to a comedy script needs to be highly judicious, otherwise the narrative is somewhat, if not entirely, lost. And then the audience is laughing at nothing at all.
Anyway, even when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t have classed a 42-year-old as ‘old’, but as the title might suggest, Davina (she was informal and disarming enough to justify first-name terms here) is looking to the future. In some ways, this is a path well-trodden – Davina is looking at her older sister, who works in the medical profession, and other friends and acquaintances who are doing whatever they’re doing in life, and wondering if she will get to the point where she even has a vague idea of the general direction of travel of her own life.
Aren’t most people, one way or another, if we’re truly honest, just winging it? Davina previously worked as a lawyer, ‘lawyer’ always being the operative term – whether she was a solicitor or a barrister is apparently not for us to know. Either way, she demonstrates self-awareness of how well her life has gone so far, all things considered. A comparison between herself and Henry VIII (not that she has beheaded a couple of spouses and divorced a couple of others) was an intriguing one, not least because it is used as a springboard to the hopeful conclusion that it’s never too late to change course. And that’s a lesson a lot of people could potentially benefit from. An easygoing and sharply observant Fringe debut.
Review by Chris Omaweng
Davina Bentley is lost, with no identity to speak of. At 42 years old, she’s not a fresh young thing like her comedy contemporaries but she’s not heading up boardrooms like her school friends, designing skyscrapers that look uncannily like penises.
But there is hope. Davina discovers that Henry VIII was 44 years old when he started doing what he did best, executing his wife. So Davina has two years to discover exactly who she is.
DAVINA BENTLEY: DANCING WHILE OLD
Pleasance Courtyard at the Edinburgh Fringe
5 to 30 August 2026
