One thing you can always expect when it comes to Emma Holland, is the unexpected.
That’s a pretty tired descriptor, but it couldn’t be more true here: Emma’s 2025 offering ‘Don’t Touch My Trinkets’ is a zany, off-the-wall presentation delving into art history and exploring the many roads Emma travelled down before landing at stand-up comedy.
Immediately curious are the four artworks on pedestals as we enter the room – each a different style and each representing touchpoints across Emma’s life. The show is primarily narrative-driven, and the artworks act as timestamps throughout. But it’s not that black and white. . . Definitely not.
Emma’s comedy stylings utilise props, a video slideshow, and sound, to keep audiences on their toes. This means, to use just one example, that a relatively straightforward story about meeting a magician at a cafe could be interrupted at any moment by a slide featuring photos of Mario characters and which race Emma thinks they are.
These totally random subplots (if you can call them that) introduce an excitement to the performance paired with an uneasy unpredictability, certainly setting her apart from many in her field.
‘Don’t Touch My Trinkets’ feels full of careful preparation and intention. . . Every side-track to the main plot (while random, as mentioned) IS there for a reason, even if that reason is simply to throw the audience off for a second. . . So it feels less like an unplanned tangent and more like an expansion of a thought (however bizarre).
A few jokes don’t land as hard as others – and from this reviewer’s perspective, this has nothing to do with their delivery and instead is largely a result of Emma’s broad appeal demographically-speaking: there are some groups in her audience who just may not get a joke as much as another group does. In a way, Emma should be proud of this. Her content is far-reaching and diverse – but this can come with its challenges, in terms of offering up something that the masses can positively respond to in equal measure.
In saying this, Emma is carving out her niche well. Her audiences are finding her. . . And what she’s presenting, slideshows and wacky added elements included, is of course hilarious – but from a production and preparation standpoint, also genuinely impressive.
