one4review | On 21, Aug 2026

Rachel Kaly opens Between Us in what I can now see is her typically low-key fashion. She barely seems to be trying. There is almost no sense of prepared material, and certainly none of the usual desperation to come out punching and immediately prove how funny she is.

Kaly tells us that she is going to ask us to speak very honestly, but that she doesn’t feel she can do that without sharing something herself first. What follows is a particularly traumatic story about a medical injury to her genitalia. She talks about her upbringing, her relationship with her mum and, almost casually, as a 100% gay woman her experience of falling in love recently with a straight man.

It should not work – but it really does.

Watching Kaly perform is a little like watching Muhammad Ali fight- her guard incredibly low. Most comedians protect themselves with material: joke, punchline, laugh, repeat. Kaly leaves herself completely exposed. At points she risks losing her natural allies and confusing everyone else, yet every single person in the room is enthralled.

She asks people what they do for work, whether they own a house, whether they own a car and whether their parents helped them buy their home. As an American interrogating a British audience, she begins treading directly across our peculiar class system, digging into how the people sitting in this room actually got to be where they are.

Her crowd work is phenomenal because she seems genuinely interested in the answers. She isn’t frightened of silence or of allowing a conversation to briefly become ordinary. She understands something fundamental: if she is genuinely curious about somebody, eventually we become curious too. Soon the entire room wants to know what everyone else has going on in their lives.

There is a pill on a table and a certificate, in this show we only get to see one used. The framework feels incredibly slight, and I don’t want to reveal where Kaly is ultimately taking us because discovering that is part of the pleasure. The show eventually climaxes with her sharing something about her mum that blindsides us to what her aim was all along.

This is masterful crowd work from an extraordinarily assured performer. It is definitely not a static show, and there is clearly room for it to develop throughout the run. There are elements of a format developed in America that are juxtaposed to the British class system, but that may ultimately make the Edinburgh version even more interesting.

I’d genuinely like to see Between Us again. Partly because it will inevitably be a completely different show, but mostly because it’s fascinating to watch someone this confident do such a skillful high dive with so little apparent framework.

★★★★½

Reviewed by Stephen “Sharpie” Sharp

Pleasance Dome – Jack Dome
Until 23 August
23.00 (1 hour)