Rose Matafeo’s New Show Effervescently Entertaining

New Zealand comedian Rose Matafeo, 25, “keeps things upbeat as she lightly interrogates Hollywood cliché and the role models on offer to young women” in her new show Sassy Best Friend, on now at Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

“Matafeo has watched a lot of romcoms, and decided that she’s classic ‘sassy best friend’ material – hence the title of this new show. But what does that mean, and is it a good thing to be? A year on from [Matafeo’s] whirlwind fringe debut with Finally Dead, this latest offering interrogates – with the lightest of touches – the personalities on offer to women, and one way in particular that those personalities can be tampered with,” Brian Logan writes in a review of the show for the Guardian.

“It’s less gimmicky and more assured than its predecessor and makes a real relatable virtue out of Matafeo’s self-doubt, as a woman with ‘enough confidence to do standup, but not enough to wear a hat’. As with Finally Dead, the show starts on the upbeat and stays there, as Matafeo performs a dippy romcom title sequence, then launches into an account of her own relationship with that Hollywood genre. ‘Classic sassy best friend,’ it turns out, might just be a euphemism for non-white and curly-haired.

“Amid the looser-fitting routines about misogynistic rap or her high-school musical career, she builds a persuasive argument for freeing young women from personality pressure, complicated or otherwise by the side-effects of the pill. And above all, she’s effervescently entertaining.”

Auckland-born Matafeo hosts the podcast Boners of the Heart with Alice Snedden on the Little Empire Podcast Network.

Sassy Best Friend is on at Edinburgh’s Pleasance Courtyard until 28 August.

Original article by Brian Logan, The Guardian, August 6, 2017.