FestBuzz

Who: Dylan Moran
Where: Play­house
When: Mon 10 and Tues 11 August
How Much: £20

In 140 char­ac­ters or less: “Dylan Moran: a slightly unhinged genius walk­ing the fine line between mad­ness and comic brilliance.”

After nearly a year and a half on the road in sup­port of his lat­est show, What It Is, Dylan Moran finally returns to his adopted home­town of Edin­burgh for a two-night stand at the Play­house at the height of the Fes­ti­val. Yet antic­i­pa­tion and excite­ment are tem­pered by appre­hen­sion after a slew of mixed reviews for the cur­rent tour. The Irish­man has recently been accused of look­ing dis­in­ter­ested on stage, dis­con­nected from his audi­ence, of giv­ing the impres­sion that gigs are an ordeal to be endured, a tire­some dis­trac­tion between glasses of wine.

Not so tonight. Whether invig­o­rated by the energy of a home­town crowd or sim­ply feed­ing off the buzz of the city dur­ing the Fringe, Moran is elec­tric. Elo­quent, intense and engag­ing, he seizes on audi­ence cues and impro­vises freely. A cough, a heckle, the sight of cam­er­a­phone set him off on mean­der­ing tan­gents. The ad-libbed sec­tions never feel out of place though he sheep­ishly con­fesses to los­ing track of the script on more than one occasion.

As ever, Moran’s stage per­sona is an amal­gam of Bernard Black, his cel­e­brated Black Books char­ac­ter, and a dis­il­lu­sioned exis­ten­tial­ist philoso­pher, neatly pick­led in wine. Rather than rely­ing on jokes and punch­lines, the Irish­man blends the mun­dane with the sur­real, his astute obser­va­tions bal­anced by won­der­fully absurd mixed metaphors and witty word­play. And while his yarns rarely hold up well to re-telling, every so often a sin­gle phrase reduces the audi­ence to tears of laughter.

Nowhere is his sub­tle brand of humour bet­ter show­cased than his Scottish-themed mate­r­ial, appar­ently writ­ten spe­cially for the brace of Edin­burgh shows. He gen­tly probes the rivalry between the cap­i­tal and Glas­gow. How­ever, rather than falling back on the Glaswe­gian stereo­type per­pet­u­ated by the likes of Frankie Boyle, Moran instead cel­e­brates the virtues of the West Coast city before coyly inform­ing the audi­ence that, “The dif­fer­ence between Glas­gow and Edin­burgh is, well, Edin­burgh is like the begin­ning of a wed­ding. Glas­gow is what’s left afterwards.”

Moran is well capa­ble of hold­ing his own against other per­form­ers when it comes to pol­i­tics, sci­ence and other sta­ple top­ics but is at his best when deal­ing with more human issues — plea­sure, pain, life, death, love, sex — and lift­ing the veil on his per­sonal life. His comic threads are spun from whimsy and anec­dote and weave a colour­ful tapes­try that exposes the deeply-buried, and often hilar­i­ous, truths about human rela­tion­ships and behaviour.

Yet for all his post-modern, decon­struc­tivist blus­ter, Moran’s ram­bling tales are ulti­mately life-affirming, under­pinned by a gen­uine warmth and a sense that, in spite of all else, love, fam­ily and guilty plea­sures are at the heart of what makes us human and are to be cher­ished. While the main set peters out rather than com­ing to a sat­is­fac­tory con­clu­sion, a superb encore more than makes amends for any short­com­ings. In a show last­ing an hour and a half — half as long again as the stan­dard What It Is set — Dylan Moran is a con­stant delight, a slightly unhinged genius walk­ing the fine line between mad­ness and comic brilliance.

Fes­t­buzz Rating:

Words: Jodi Mullen