Adam of the Riches

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“Lights! Steam! ‘Crockett’s Theme’!” yells a half-naked, hoarse-voiced Adam Riches before joining a hapless audience victim under a makeshift shower for a little Imperial Leathering. Yep, he’s back. As meek as ever.

Retaining much of the wild, careering character comedy that saw Riches bag the Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2011, tonight’s assortment of shrinking violets includes, most potently, a superhunk take on Sean Bean (“I wasn’t born… I was smelted!”), a smarmy cocktail “mixologist” with a face that needs slapping, a dunderheaded take on Ryan Gosling, his lascivious mother (Ms Goose, of course) and body-confident ultraman, Victor Legit. Only the drawling tattooist with electric toothbrush hands outstays his welcome.

But Riches knows it’s in the margins where he comes into his own, improvising with everyone from the lighting operator to the hooded onstage sidekicks to the procession of mostly male 'volunteers’ extracted from the front row. He takes a risk, and we go with him. He’s given the odd gift, mind, with missed sound cues and plenty of participatory enthusiasm, but boy does he run with it, dispensing sardonic soundbites (“Wow! Our conversation is flowing like warm butter on a Spaniard’s back!”) seemingly on the fly.

Beneath the heady, high speed anarchy, Riches' carefully selected audience interactions might take a subtextual swipe at male bravado, but that's to belittle the sheer dumb fun of it all. He mightn’t have the surprise factor of a few years ago, but still: when he’s good, he’s very, very good.