Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2017 – How to Suffer Better***

A wacky slice of neurotic New York life is served up by Amanda Erin Miller in a high-energy Edinburgh Fringe debut.

Miller, 33, presents a handful of angst-ridden characters, ranging from a multiple-complex-suffering hobo with a split personality and a clown at the heart of a bureaucratic nightmare to an 87-year-old widow, Edith Shlivovitz, all of whose friends are dead, who invents the Sex-Ray dating app.

A whirling, post-lunch hour passes in harmless, knockabout fun in this endearing externalisation of Ms Miller’s inventive mind (when she is not tutoring barmitzvah or batmitzvah students or doing massage therapy).

There’s a tendency, such is the subject matter, for it to get rather shouty and for the reserved British audience (of four when I turned up, including me and Terry Miller, Amanda’s mum) not to be quite as responsive as, perhaps, New Yorkers may be. But it would be churlish not to cherish its heartfelt scream at life’s frustrations.