Matt Winning: Ragnarok

• Brian Donaldson
• 26 August 2016

This article is from 2016.

An obtuse but empty jaunt into the future

There might be a successful career in kids entertainment awaiting Matt Winning on the evidence of this sci-fi based hour. The Scottish comic has a wide-eyed innocence and excitable naivety which could work well in an environment other than a grown-up Fringe comedy show. Ragnarok is not surreal enough to be mind-blowing nor adult enough to be an edgy experience. So what, exactly, is it other than a knockabout hour of silliness? We're a hundred years into the future with a relative of Winning's (Oscar: get it?) on board a space ship with its sarcastic super-computer called CAL, both of whom are in possession of Matt's diary from 2016. Entries from the August of that month detail that he performed a landmark comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe and luckily Oscar and CAL have footage of it to show us while they head off to enjoy small-screen adult-Martian entertainment.

Even in a world set up to be bamboozling, it still needs to play by its own rules; so at one point Oscar Winning claims not to know what the Fringe is but we are then informed that it was wholly responsible for triggering the next global financial meltdown. Within Matt's stand-up (sadly there's nothing landmark about it), he gets too tied up in being obtuse about corn on the cob and clay pigeons to deliver anything of substance.

Opium, until 27 Aug, 3.45pm, free.