John-Luke Roberts: Stnad Up

Middle class male absurdists in their late 20s with an enfeebled sense of masculinity need to work pretty hard to stand out at the Fringe. You might have noticed quite a few of them around. John-Luke Roberts fits the profile. He's 29 ("old for a baby, young for a glacier"), he founded the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society (making him a semi-bigshot in the late-20s absurdism scene), and he tells jokes about his breakup.

A brilliant opening sequence sets in motion the show's two strands: weirdness and angst. Regretting that the failed relationship never had a properly acrimonious climax, he gets an audience member to do what his girlfriend wouldn't and chuck a glass of water in his face. Roberts gets good mileage out of his face, which is mournful and bearded. Soon it is caked in flour which another punter must dab off for him, a highly intimate process, while Roberts mimes along to Gotye's slinky 'Somebody that I used to know.' Later on there's an inspired bit with lots and lots of lemons. Roberts' face turns sour as he looks mournfully at yet another lemon. He knows what he must do. Clouds of citrus tang waft over us.

Unfortunately these set-pieces sometimes seem like icebergs adrift in a sea of ordinary gags. Some of this stuff—a few visual half-jokes scrawled on an A2 pad, a tiresome skit with a dinosaur puppet—relies too heavily on the ramshackle nature of the performance and Roberts' artfully downbeat delivery to obscure the fact that it's only fitfully funny. Still, there's more than enough virtuosity on show here to lift Roberts above the run of the mill, and make Stnad Up worth watching.