Sophie Willan, Edinburgh Festival review: Frank and extremely funny

​The final week of the Edinburgh Fringe is where dreams come true or turn to ash. For Bolton's Sophie Willan this is shaping up to be a breakthrough Festival. She has already bagged a Herald Angel award from the Glasgow Herald and when the prestigious lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Award nominations are announced on Wednesday it would be a travesty if she did not make the shortlist.

Branded, her new show, builds on last year’s debut, where she picked up plaudits for being a northern, working class woman. But Willan, 29, does not like labels and here she sets out to undercut various stereotypes, succeeding in dramatic and very amusing style.

Her approach is frank and extremely funny. Imagine a smutty council estate Victoria Wood. Willan, all friendliness and flame-red hair, paints a vivid picture of her dysfunctional family. Her mother, for example, was a vegan heroin addict. You do not get many of those to the pound. She mistakenly thought her absent father was rock star Richard Ashcroft. There is no absence of verve in the way she tells an anecdote.

Towards the end she reveals a dark secret about her past. For a while she worked as an escort and compares it to stand-up – both jobs are about "going into rooms with strangers saying ‘love me’ for money." Willan, however, changed direction and is now making headway in a career that perfectly suits her quick wit. The escort industry's loss is clearly comedy’s gain.

Until August 27; edfringe.com