Alison Larkin has Desmond Tutu seal of approval for new Edinburgh show

In a market as crowded as Edinburgh in August, every performer is looking for a unique selling point. Alison Larkin’s is a good one: Bishop Desmond Tutu told her to write the show she is bringing to the Fringe later this month.

The actor, comedian, bestselling author and podcaster first met the late Archbishop 15 years ago.

“My friend Karen was making a documentary with him, and she was staying at my house,” explained Alison, who was born in the US, adopted by British parents and raised in England and Africa.

“She was going to dinner with him and asked me if I wanted to come.

“We’re in this fancy restaurant and I’m at the end of the table. There are two impressive young men next to him, talking about themselves. Suddenly, he stops the conversation.

“He says, ‘I did not win the Nobel Peace Prize to listen to you two going on and on about how great you are because you think I might be able to help you in your careers, while you completely ignore the young woman at the end of the table’. He asked me about myself.

“I explained I was adopted and came to America to find my birth mother, and then I became a stand-up comic and now I do voices for a living.

“He asked if I had a good adoption and I explained I was very lucky. Then I added, ‘Then again, if I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow, today I could’ve been married to Woody Allen’, and Tutu cracked up.

“He invited me to join his party for two days. When he discovered I could do Margaret Thatcher’s voice, we’d sit and talk politics and we would get hysterical.

“At one point he got very still, and he said, ‘Alison, I don’t know why but I want to tell you something and I want you to remember it: I can’t control what happens to me, but I can control how I respond to it.’”

Those words would resonate with Alison several years later. But before they did, she wrote a bestselling novel about adoption, which Tutu read and enjoyed.

“I was fed up with the way adopted people are constantly portrayed as eternally damaged victims at best, or serial killers at worst, in commercial fiction, so I decided to have an adopted heroine in my novel,” she explained.

“Tutu read it and said to me that he loved the way I’d taken what is usually a dense and complex subject and made it accessible.”

Alison had lived with a distrust of love and failed to ever truly get close to a partner. Then she met Bhina, an Indian climate scientist, when they were both in their 50s, and she finally found true love.

A week after they agreed to marry, he died suddenly.

“I’d avoided love because I was afraid of the worst happening. Then I found the real thing and the worst did happen.

“Instead of this abject despair, though, I had an extra energy and a sort of joy, and I didn’t understand it. I kept thinking about what Tutu had said to me, and our mutual friend encouraged me to reach out to him.

“I wrote to him and asked why I felt this way. He didn’t answer my question but he sent me five emails and told me I knew how to take a really difficult subject and make it accessible, so I needed to make sure this story was told as widely as possible because it would bring hope to a world that badly needs it at the moment.”

And that is why Alison Larkin finds herself back in Edinburgh, 24 years since she last appeared at the Fringe, with Grief… A Comedy, which she says is more about love than about loss. Desmond Tutu would no doubt approve.

Alison Larkin: Grief… A Comedy, Assembly George Square, Studio 2, July 31-August 25 (except 12 & 19), 2.10pm