Maya Ricote: Ay Am! at Pleasance Courtyard Review
A confession: I do not like clown comedy, as a genre. It has many fans out there but I am not one of them, I personally find it exhausting in the way a toddler with a kazoo is exhausting. So I didn't request a press ticket for Ay Am!; it seemed unsporting to review a clown show having already decided I didn't like them. I bought my own ticket, sat at the back of the Cellar with my arms folded, and waited to be proven right.
I was not proven right.
Most Fringe shows open with a performer walking onstage. Ay Am! opens with a woman being defrosted. Maya Ricote emerges from a fridge in a cloud of vape smoke: a ninety-something telenovela star cryogenically preserved in a twenty-five-year-old body that is, anatomically, mostly balloons. The wig is enormous. The nails are Post-It notes. She has been thawed for one day, courtesy of a talent-agency contract signed somewhere in the last century, and that day contains the audition that will finally make her a star. All she must do is be as over-the-top as possible and cry on cue.
Ricote trained in Mexican soap opera before she found clowning, and the genius of Ay Am! is realising the two are the same discipline. Both take a feeling and turn it up until it distorts. She pushes it, then pushes further, then catches your eye to let you know she also thinks this is ridiculous. Those tiny mask-slips are where the biggest laughs live and they had me laughing so hard and so much, my stomach still hurts days later.
Under the balloons, she and co-creator Dan Lees have something sharper. The contract is the bargain every woman in entertainment is offered: be young, be smooth, be palatable. A quiet song wondering whether she could simply be ordinary lands like a slap after forty minutes of screaming. And the ending, which I won't spoil, removes the clown and reframes every gag before it.
Turns out I don't hate clown comedy. I'd just never seen her do it.
Pleasance Courtyard (Cellar), until 30 August, 10:40pm.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Written by Kerry for Theatre and Tonic, August 2026.