'The doctor told me if I went home I wouldn't live through the night'

“I didn’t tell her how often I was changing my tampons and pads,” Robertson adds. “Every half hour. I wasn’t really vocal about it because I didn’t know what was normal.”

But on the night before the exam Robertson was so stressed and exhausted her mum decided to take her to the hospital to see if they could help.

“In casualty they took a sample of my blood and the doctor and nurse were totally like, ‘Don’t worry.’ Really casual. 

Comedian Marjolein Robertson poses for portrait at the Kimpton Hotel Charlotte Square in Edinburgh (Image: Duncan McGlynn)

“But when the doctor came back into the room his demeanour had completely changed. He said, ‘You’re going to stay in overnight.’ 

“And my mam was like, ‘No, she can’t. She’s got an English exam tomorrow.’ And the doctor said, ‘If she goes home now she won’t live through the night.’ And I burst out crying.”

She looks across the table at me. “And it is definitely shocking. In many ways I feel worse for mam, because the idea of walking into your child’s room in the morning and them not waking up ... Because she’d have tried to wake me up for my exam and I wouldn’t have got up. And that’s horrible.”

We are sitting in the Kimpton Hotel in Edinburgh surrounded by businessmen answering emails and taking calls. It’s an incongruous place to be talking about a near death experience perhaps, but then Robertson, who is now in her thirties but looks much younger, will be spending most of August in Edinburgh talking about it. 

That teenage moment is at the heart of Robertson’s new Fringe show, O, an hour of comedy about periods, adenomyosis (a condition that causes abnormally heavy menstruation), contraception and its side-effects and women’s health.

But is also about the oldest folk tale in Shetland and Orkney, that of Sea Midder.

“She’s our oldest god ,” Robertson explains, “this living embodiment of the sea. She brings fertility and life so she’s also a goddess of spring and summer. 

“It’s about her eternal battle with Teran, the spirit of winter.”

That combination is not as incongruous as it might at first seem. Robertson has always been as much a storyteller as she is a stand-up. And she has previous when it comes to weaving together lived experience and folklore. Her Fringe show last year, Marj, combined the story of selkies with that of an abusive relationship. 

Her USP as a stand-up has always been a kind of magic realism that doesn’t stint on the reality.

It’s why she is simply one of the freshest comic voices to come out of Scotland for a long time. Yes, that’s partly down to her honesty - she has also spoken about her ADHD in the past - but it also has much to do with the way her Shetland background has shaped everything from her accent to her worldview. 

Oh yeah and it helps that she’s funny too.

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Many of us will have first seen her in 2022 when she was a finalist in the BBC Comedy Awards. But she has been on the comedy circuit for years. Robertson made her Fringe debut back in 2016. After getting a two-star review in 2018 (“totally fair,” she says) she opted to move down to get “gig-fit”. The pandemic sent her home to Shetland for a couple of years and she only came back in 2022 when things began to really accelerate for her. 

“I did a show that year about ADHD and it all really kicked off.”

Her journey to stand-up includes an almost hilariously terrible time in Amsterdam where she was fired from her job, robbed, got kicked out of her flat and was given a place on a comedy improv place out of pity. But it can probably be traced further back to her childhood on Shetland where she was obsessed with stand-up and took part in school productions and was in the Shetland Youth Theatre from a young age. 

And, she adds, she grew up in a culture in which storytelling was central. “Hearing a good story and telling a good story. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. That’s what I did with Marj and that’s what I’m trying to do with O. Every stand-up show is entwined with a folk tale. When you are a bairn and you hear a folk tale you think that is a magical fun story with peril and excitement. As an adult you suddenly see the meaning behind it and it can be quite shocking.”

The story of the selkie bride, she says, can be seen as a story about domestic abuse. “It’s a story about someone being so much in control of you they’ve taken away the essence of you.”

Robertson had experienced something similar herself. The selkie story, in which a fisherman steals a selkie's skin so she has to remain in human form, she says, was a “cheat code” to talk about her own experience.

“That show was written to help anyone who has been in a similar situation,” she says now.

Writing Marj, she adds, prompted her to go into therapy, “because I kept thinking I was a narcissist. I kept thinking it was my fault. I kept thinking I must have deserved that. That’s what gaslighting does to you.”

Marj was the first of a trilogy, she says. O is part two. She hopes talking about her menstrual history can also help others.

“One of the reasons I would have died is because I didn’t know what was normal. It wasn’t spoken about enough.”

And while most women won’t suffer from adenomyosis as she has, many will experience discomfort and needless suffering, Robertson says, “because there is not enough help with periods.

“And how many times do women go to the doctor and feel like they’re not listened to?”

Did that near death experience at 16 change her, I ask? “I sometimes wonder if it should be more traumatic? But as a child I grew up on a croft and me and my brother were always playing dangerous games. We were climbing up places we shouldn’t be. We were setting fire to things. And we were always ending up in casualty. I’ve got scars over my body. See this on my lips? It looks like piercings. A dog bit me on the lip.”

Her brother got worse. He once got a nail through his hand. “It almost went gangrenous. I watched it happen. It was pretty gnarly.”

O, she says, is also a show about shame. “We would have lambing time and you’d talk about sheep viscerally. I grew up with this hands-on experience of life and birth and death. But somewhere as a teenager suddenly that becomes a shameful topic. Your body and your sexuality becomes a no no. So that means the shame could have been lethal for me.”

Marjolein Robertson (Image: free)

Women need to shake off this idea of shame, she says. “And a way of doing that is being open about my own experience.”

She apologises. “Sorry, I feel like I’m being very raw to you.”

No need, I say. This is what marks her out as a comedian, this openness and honesty. You do wonder, though, if she protects herself enough. But maybe that’s the parent in me piping up.

About her ADHD, I say. It strikes me that a lot of comedians have been willing to open about being neurodivergent recently.

“I have a theory that in comedy you’re either neurodivergent, you’re depressed or you are a sociopath,” Robertson says, laughing.

If anything, she adds, the Fringe is the best thing for her ADHD. “I can do backwards days. My mornings are my evenings. I can sleep in, have a slow breakfast, do something enjoyable, go to the gym. Afternoon is writing and admin. Evening is working. It’s a privilege because with ADHD you can struggle to get going in the morning.

“You’re doing the same show in the same venue at the same time,” she concludes,” so you know your pattern. People get tired, but if I could do the Fringe for 12 months I would. I love it.”

Marjolein Robertson: O is at Monkey Barrel Comedy (The Hive) from July 30-August 25 (except August 12)