August 21, 2026 at The Tron at Monkey Barrel
Amy Matthews starts this afternoon by lampooning how difficult middle-aged men have it, before hitting us with a couple of really great bits about sneezes and jam. I haven’t seen her before and this is my first indication that I’m about to watch an hour of very clever comedy.
Sometimes a comedian takes a while to warm up a room and so their first few minutes can feel precarious. Others have two or three jokes specifically for the purpose right at the top, to allay the fears of unsure audience members. Matthews is somewhere between the two camps, relaxing into the performance before setting out her stall and hitting us with the first few well-constructed laughs. She’s confident in how funny she is, and knows what she’s doing.
She can’t get angry, though. Or at least not on cue. She has a condition called alexithymia, sometimes known as emotional blindness, which introduces a processing delay to some emotional responses. It’s a trait that often co-occurs with autism, although she heads off any allegations of that sort with a well-drawn story about how she loved making potions as a kid. No, like really loved. So yeah, maybe?
As per the title of the show, she uses numerous definitions of the word ‘toast’ as a structural conceit, upon which to hang some excellent stand-up. She even has a nice, if expensive, prop to sell that with a pop.
When she specifically requests Sylvia Plath’s fringe, Matthews’ hairdresser intervenes with a check-in that begins the narrative tumble into a whole series of personal revelations. She’s a recovering people pleaser, and recognising this allows her to spot a pattern of relationships with men that she’s glad to finally have broken. Although she complains about the instant formality we sometimes develop after a relationship ends, which she reckons would be more useful as a pre-buffer.
Matthews has the best Boomer / Gen Z material I’ve seen on the Fringe this year, maybe any year, with observations about phone use that I reckon would be a good candidate for virality if it was clipped up for socials. And there’s a really enjoyable exploration of how all of our parents have gone mad, which certainly rang true for me.
A poetic finale hits hard and leaves the audience, at least on the day I saw it, stunned in their seats. I’m really looking forward to seeing Amy Matthews again.
Sarah Stringer