The Brighton based comedian Stefania Licari was, as part of the Brighton Fringe, performing her last show on the festival at The Caroline of Brunswick.
The show Trust Me I’m A Comedian is all about female empowerment. Stefania has a fascinating background, being an ex-intensive care doctor, migrant working in the UK, comedian, actor and sometime endurance runner, running the 260 kilometres MDS, Marathon des Sables, in the Sahara Desert!
She hilariously comments on her life experiences and women’s rights.
Licari wonderfully manic and excited as she takes the stage at The Caroline of Brunswick. She works the audience well and hilariously, even dealing with a good humoured heckler with the retort “this isn’t a Q&A”!
We’re told right away that she’s Italian, from Milan where everyone looks well turned out from head to toe. She explains that the traditional Italian women, like her mother, grandmother and generations before and to come are expected to marry, cook, clean and have babies. All pointed out succinctly by her beloved grandmother. Italian women are supposed to be perfectly coiffed, waxed and made up at all times and her waxing routine stories caused many belly loughs from the crowd.
Stefania’s ideas for her future didn’t fit into the traditional slot so she moved to the UK where she compares English to Italian men and the Brits on the whole come up lacking. She comments on bras, Germans, witches being burnt, religion and boyfriends.
Her story from the NHS, disturbing and slightly funny, where she saves a young woman’s life only to be told that she couldn’t wear a thong as it upset other doctors when she bent over is galling to say the least!
She cleverly circles round to previous subjects using phrases from earlier, tying everything together.
Working toward the end of the show she goes into depth about her running the 260 kilometres MDS, Marathon des Sables, in the Sahara Desert. Her comedy turns to a serious commentary as she finds herself lost and losing consciousness, unknowingly close to the end but lost. She remembers all the women who didn’t have a voice to scream about the wrongs that they endured and so she pushes on, for those females, against all odds.
She concludes her set telling us that whereas those women didn’t have a voice but there was one person who did – herself.
Hysterically funny, energetic and heartbreaking at turns Stefania Licari is worth following for a great, 4 star, funny and sometimes sobering night out.
