By Ron Bingham
A very loud and boisterous audience for this show. Partly as we’d just escaped the rain and partly because there was a bar at the back open before the show started. A full house to see Olga, who started the show by doing some dance moves through the audience before bounding onto the stage. We first received a history of how Olga’s family became rich (in the right place when the USSR broke up), and her life in Russia, then the USA and finally in London, the benefits of being wealthy through luck and the advantages that gives.
Olga is a very confident communicator, possibly thanks to her years in IT trying to persuade kids in eastern European countries to join a certain famous video sharing platform, before she quit. We are regaled with stories of living with sudden wealth, of being too wealthy for some situations, not wealthy enough in others and some personal anecdotes from Olga’s life.
Mostly the show is about the class structure, and how it manifests in different countries – Russia, where having money is all down to luck, the USA, where it could be hard work or a recent inheritance, and the UK, where there’s money sloshing around in the family for centuries.
Olga is a brilliant, polished comedian. She was a little worried near the end, where we all appeared to be more fascinated by the ideas she was expounding and forgetting to laugh, but then a man in the front row piped up to mention he knew her dad in the old days – leading to someone else in the same row asking if he was an assassin who had come for Olga.
Olga Koch Comes From Money is on at Monkey Barrel Comedy until August 25
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/olga-koch-comes-from-money