Laura Solon

The Owl of Steven begins promisingly enough, because it's just Laura Solon under the lights. She has carefully honed a winning stage persona: an overgrown little girl, a clever clogs who's been allowed to stay up late and put on a show. Butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, which always makes rudeness more fun. She introduces the show: it would be a choose-your-own adventure story if her audience wasn't so disruptive, but as it is we'll have to settle for having our adventure chosen for us.

The problems start when the story gets underway and Solon has to share the stage with her own comic creations. It's broadly a quest: a documentary-maker's attempts to film the elusive owl for which the island of Steven is famous, thwarted at every turn by the provincial machinations of an islandful of wacky characters including mysterious French secret agents "from a restaurant colony" and a daft model who had a "gay scare".

Most of the characters are funny enough individually, but they bog the story down with their ornately contrived idiosyncrasies. Each is a vehicle for Solon to try out a new accent and display her joke-making, which is almost virtuosic: she sustains a slanging match between two society ladies for a good few minutes, the diversion justified by the ceaseless invention of the insults. The gags continue compulsively, and Solon barely utters a sentence free of a Pythonesque non-sequitur. Eventually they swamp the show. You can have too many funny accents, and doubling the jokes doesn't necessarily double the funny.