EdFringe Review: Diona Doherty: Get Your Pink Back!

Diona Doherty is a confident and accomplished performer, and it shines through in her Edinburgh debut, ‘Get Your Pink Back’.

Poised and full of attitude, she barrels onto stage determined to reclaim her ‘pink’ – an allusion to mother Flamingo’s tendency to lose their iconic pink hue after producing eggs. Well, two children of her own, plus 3 inherited from her husband, has left Diona feeling blanched – it’s time to get her pink back.

Her material is packed with highly relatable stuff, from her green-eyed envy of her husband’s sleeping abilities, and apparently untroubled, simplistic thoughts, to an eyebrow-raising tool of early 2000s body-negative TV. Thanks to a touch of well-clipped tech, she lets the odious Trinny and Susannah speak their horrors for themselves.

Sound samples are something she returns to at irregular intervals to varying effect, but building up to a technically impressive and funny finale.

“Diona Doherty is a confident, and accomplished performer, and it shines through in her Edinburgh debut, ‘Get Your Pink Back’.“

It’s very useful, however, when taking the audience back to her time on ‘Britain & Ireland’s Next Top Model’ back in 2012. It’s an attempt to reconnect with her fashion sense and to unlearn unhealthy lessons which scuppered her long before pregnancy. That said, whilst her love of stationery is very much intact, I doubt she’ll resurrect her ‘unique high heels’ anytime soon. If that connection baffles you, you know where the ticket link is.

It also must be said that Diona has some natural talent with crowdwork; in fact, she gives off the energy of an extroverted, funny friend you haven’t seen in a long time. Perhaps she relies too much on her extreme personability, however, and pays a touch too little attention to the nuts and bolts of laugh-out-loud comedy. She surprises with a few cracking punchlines, but elsewhere, you do see them coming a little ways off. She has a strong, natural sense of where the laughs are to be found, but jumps to the payoff a little too abruptly.

That said, she obviously has the chops to make herself a formidable comedy performer, and I’d love to see her next year (or the one after) to see whether this Flamingo has taken flight.