EdFringe Review: Brian Bilston: How to Lay an Egg with a Horse Inside 

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Brian Bilston is funny; there’s no doubt about that. I saw him at The Stand in Newcastle a few years ago and have followed him on Insta ever since. That night he was laugh-out-loud funny, and my jaw and sides ached as my friends and I hurtled down the Bigg Market to catch the last train home afterwards. It was worth it for a night being entertained by this clever rhymer—who sometimes doesn’t even rhyme at all.

Today’s show was a bit more low-key and made me smile rather than laugh out loud most of the time. It was a daytime show—just after 4pm—as opposed to the Newcastle gig, which was an evening show, though I’m not sure that’s where the difference lay. If my memory serves me right, there were a lot more stories to accompany the poems, and the stories themselves were brilliantly funny. But perhaps it’s my memory playing tricks. That was back in 2023 when Brian Bilston (spoiler alert, not actually his real name) leapt from Twitter to the stage for pretty much the first time.

Brian Bilston at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Low-Key Laughs and Deeper Meaning

Bilston is a confessed introvert and quite shy and said he took to the stage initially to pay the bills, as he’d given up the day job to concentrate on being a poet. His shows are as minimal as they come—a stool (for books and a bottle of water) and a mic—and his persona is mainly quite deadpan, but those mischievous eyes do a lot of the talking for him. He also relies on clever spacing of words and lines, with slight hesitations before a line you’d probably not expect.

Today’s show had a bit of a theme of Bilston being ‘the better poet’ than his (sometimes made-up) rivals. This was mainly tongue-in-cheek—and as the show progressed, something the audience learned to expect. Bilston has been dubbed the Poet Laureate of Twitter and I was sorry to hear him criticising our current actual Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, for not having written a poem about the Andrew/Epstein situation. No need for sniping, Brian.

He says a bit about how often people are put off poetry at school. His poems are easy to understand, so no ‘practical criticism’ required. In some ways he reminds me of a modern-day Spike Milligan. Although his poems seem lightweight and a bit silly, there is often a bit more depth to them than appears on the surface. And he’s great at the killer last line, which turns the seeming premise of the poem on its head (try ‘Frisbee’). I think his greatest poem is ‘Refugee’ which is read forwards and then backwards, and the same words, in reverse order, mean quite the opposite. It’s genius. He didn’t recite it today—and that’s no criticism—but if you read it, you will see there is more depth to this man than his clever quips might suggest.

So I came away with mixed feelings. A bit disappointed that it hadn’t been as funny as I’d remembered or expected, and yet I had been entertained, albeit gently, for most of the sixty minutes Bilston was on stage. Would I recommend the show? Yes, but probably not to the girls I ran through the Bigg Market with that night in 2023, when we’d cried laughing at the man about whom one of my friends said, “I used to work with him – his name isn’t Brian!”

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