Phil Kay: In Tweed

It's five minutes into Phil Kay's show, and he is already naked. Deep in the bowels of of the Gilded Balloon, he is rubbing his exposed groin on a poster of Jason Manford which, on his way in, he picked up. Just for us. "It's supposed to build to this!" he laments. But the cat is out of the bag—literally and metaphorically—and Kay starts as one can't help but think he always meant to go on. His debagging kicks off an hour of stream-of-consciousness mayhem – or, more specifically, "40 minutes of stories with about 20 minutes of fucking around".

It's not entirely clear where the "fucking around" stops, and the stories start for, quite simply, there is nobody else at the Fringe doing what Phil Kay does. Frenetic, anarchic and utterly unpredictable, Kay follows whatever mad tangents, odd digressions and suicidal leaps of comedic faith his quick mind and his watchful eyes happen upon. These are layered—and layered, and layered—onto madcap stories of his run-ins with the police. What's more, Kay's pickles are utterly believable.

Kay's talent as an improviser is, clearly, extraordinary. Uncovering unexpected comedic insights from the most unlikely ground, and expressing them in rapid torrents of words—sometimes filthy, sometimes alliterative, rhythmical and poetic—he is quite something to watch. Unfortunately this is genius with an achilles heel, depending as it does on the audience for energy and material. The launchpads for those flights of fancy just aren't in the room tonight, and Phil Kay will have to be very lucky, or have to work superhumanly hard, to wrestle his 7pm crowd into the state of mayhem in which his comedy thrives.