Celia Pacquola: Let Me Know How It All Works Out

Here's a tricky one: how can an eminently down-to-earth comic, someone whose stock-in-trade is pointing out folly, also visit psychics? Anyone seeking to challenge Celia Pacquola on this contradiction needn't bother – she's way ahead of you.

As a quick straw poll suggests, she'll be playing to sceptics all month. So this chirpy, self-assured Australian wastes no time rattling off the double standards her habit entails. She's book-smart, she readily mocks mystics for their misspelt signs and fondness for purple, and—gleefully demolishing the trendy stranger who tried to seduce her with a twee, hand-made card—for the most part she brooks no bullshit.

Yet when a palm-reader drops a bombshell on Pacquola, it sends her spiralling into introspection, a health scare and a breakup. This might lose some of the audience were it not for her brisk, gag-heavy style and the compelling argument that her therapy's no different from any other. It’s merely an ego trip, she says, a reassurance that she’s not the one in control.

As themes go, Pacquola's made a shrewd choice. Fortune-telling, with all its implications for fate and responsibility, neatly fits a shambolic 31 year-old trying to make sense of life. It's also pliable enough for her to scuttle off on sillier observational tangents, then sneak back to the narrative at hand. Considering she's mingling heartbreak and drinking alone with impressions of various beds, this takes no small amount of skill.

Like all the best story-based hours, it sustains the illusion that everything's in there for a reason, and she toys with the expectation that she'll check her watch and go "48 minutes – better have an epiphany”. But Pacquola is more honest than that, and with tongue-in-cheek wit she executes a tricksy final play that, aptly, few could see coming.