Jason John Whitehead: Letters from Mindy

Last year, after a five year long relationship, Jason John Whitehead found himself unceremoniously dumped. Having been stranded in Australia as a result of the Icelandic volcano eruption, he returned home to find his girlfriend had moved in with her mother and was not coming back. Letters from Mindy is Whitehead's attempt to understand and get over the breakup.

It is a charming show, full of daft stories about his friends' less-than-successful attempts at cheering him up. Indeed, it is as much about rekindled friendship as it is about lost love, and listening to Whitehead jovially discuss his friends' bizarre coping strategies is a real highlight. It is with these anecdotes that Whitehead displays a real flair for storytelling.

If there is one major flaw in this show, it's that it lacks any convincing sense of poignancy. It is a little difficult to really care about Whitehead's crumbled relationship when we're never given any real personal insight into who this ex-girlfriend was and why he was in love with her. Nor do we ever get a real sense as to why the relationship ended. Perhaps it is that Whitehead genuinely doesn't know. Perhaps he considers it too private to go into in such depth. But as it is, Letters From Mindy too often errs on the side of generic breakup jokes and not enough on the side of the genuinely insightful or touching. It's good fun, but not much more than that.