This one’s from the heart … Temi Wilkey in Lover Girl. Photograph: Jonny Ruff View image in fullscreen This one’s from the heart … Temi Wilkey in Lover Girl. Photograph: Jonny Ruff Edinburgh festival 2026 Review Temi Wilkey: Lover Girl review – wildly intimate comedy goes to infinity and beyond Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Both outrageous and tender, this stellar follow-up to Main Character Energy gives new meaning to body language
Chris Wiegand Tue 18 Aug 2026 08.31 CEST Last modified on Tue 18 Aug 2026 08.36 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T emi Wilkey serenades us, asks if we fancy her and wonders if the love of her life could be here right now. The G spot? Call it the T spot, says Temi, before popping the question: “Do you want to come inside my Infinity Pussy?”
It’s seductive stuff and, naturally, the room agrees to take things to the next level. Cue a conversation between Wilkey and, with a soundscape to make you blush and a quick change into a ruffled reddish peignoir, her forthright vagina.
View image in fullscreen Theatrical ritual … Temi Wilkey in Lover Girl. Photograph: Jonny Ruff This sets up a spiky duologue initially akin to how Elouise Eftos, also juggling roles, is emboldened and mocked by the goddess of love in her equally fun fringe hour Aphrodite . Wilkey, more briefly, touches on Greek mythology too. Both shows speak from the heart – directly, in Wilkey’s case, as she gently cradles herself to act out the role of that organ, not blithely pumping away but aching and in need of healing.
Is it character comedy if you’re portraying your own nether regions? For Wilkey that’s not (just) a route to rude laughs but a bid to understand how she fits together as a person. The show follows her journey to self-love – which is also the key relationship in Elf Lyons ’s memorable breakup show this year.
Directed by Ragevan Vasan, with a glam stage design akin to her 2024 debut Main Character Energy , Wilkey’s Lover Girl is in the theatre not comedy section of the festival. She is also a playwright and its stirring final minutes combine free-flowing performance poetry with intimate ritual. Not that she is short on one-liners, including how British culture is frozen in time for her Nigerian family (“less gen X, more Gen Austen”), while she squeezes a lot of juice from Ron DeSantis’s “don’t say gay ” edict for Florida. It’s not the only bit where the gags arrive from all angles.
The storytelling comes with bursts of dance and she sings snippets of lyrics (including from Tevin Campbell’s Can We Talk) to locate autobiographical scenes yet expand them into a recognisable shared experience. Music is also used to distinguish between her notions of straight and queer sex as she brings wild physicality first to a bluntly staccato accompaniment and then to multitudinous free jazz.
It’s a stellar sophomore fringe hour, still full of main character energy but slowly building in communal hope as she calls for social change. Standup may not get much more inward-looking than that early offer to the audience but Wilkey clearly cares deeply about what’s happening in the outside world too.
At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh , until 30 August