Ali Brice Presents Home is Where Eric Meat is

There's a promising conceit behind Ali Brice's continuing adventures of Eric Meat – now almost entirely detached from his accompanying backstory and now existing as an inexplicable lunatic in the world. Beset by sadness, Meat is in the process of deleting his memories, so that he can't find himself comparing his lonely life unfavourably with the past. Given the Proustian rush of recollections he can attract from such unsavoury objects as an audience member's sock he's sucking on, the possibilities for where he can take this are seemingly endless.

He summons, genie-like, his usual cavalcade of weird and wonderful characters. Sprung into life by Brice behind a flimsy curtain and silly, upbeat soundtrack, they're invariably one-joke, rudimentary yet elaborately costumed creations, such as the original Werther's Original. But they're brought to life by Brice's superior crowdwork, a particularly strong suit being the barking aggression that he maintains for busty shoe shop owner Francine.

Casually indifferent to, even amusingly cruel towards the marks that he drags from the crowd, impounding their possessions and interpreting their reluctance to participate as the opposite, it's a winning formula that relies on both Brice and the audience being in the mood. It may have been my imagination but his heart didn't seem to be in it on the afternoon I saw it and the show ended perfunctorily around the 45-minute mark – a fleeting echo of the anarchic, hyper-weirdness that Brice has made his name with. Still, it felt like an off day rather than anything more fundamental, an ever-present risk with an act this unscripted.