Liam Mullone: Game Over

Onstage nastiness is a discipline fraught with danger. Gasps may be as rewarding as laughs, but get the tone wrong and you’ll wind up with a roomful of silent irritation, like a loony ranting in a library.

Liam Mullone is clearly a gifted wordsmith. Having worked for The Times for years he now writes for Henning Wehn, and actually mentions that early on here, which is rather ungracious given that Wehn is playing next door. It’s presumably intended to sound self-deprecating (given Wehn’s much longer queue) but comes across as quite the opposite, the first indication that this is going to be an oddly off-putting hour.

Mullone proceeds to veer from the self-aggrandising to the self-destructive, insisting that he’ll keep playing the Fringe until he gets the recognition he deserves, then breaks off towards the end to ask this increasingly unresponsive audience whether they all came to see him after failing to get into a more popular show. The subsequent silence is excruciating.

His wordplay is frequently erudite and inventive, but the set is peppered with unsuccessful, sometimes skin-crawlingly unpleasant attempts to shock, which sit uneasily with his slightly quirky persona: imagine Harry Enfield impersonating Harry Hill, who himself is impersonating Robin Ince, but a radically repented version that prefers Mrs Thatcher to Richard Dawkins.

The much more popular Ince and Mark Steel also get a snide mention here, likewise (in one particularly self-indulgent section) various broadsheets and journalists who never bother reviewing him.

That may be a blessing in disguise.