Owen O'Neill: Struck by Lightning

It's not a good sign when, a third of the way into a show, one starts keeping a tally of the number of times a performer forgets their lines – much less so when that little game is almost as enjoyable as the show. Sadly, that's the case in an hour that just isn't funny enough to forgive being as shambolic as it is.

O'Neill's choice of subject matter—his being struck by lightning while stealing apples from the nuns' orchard—is interesting enough, and he does well to make the outrageous events of his subsequent life at least feel believable. But the cast of characters O'Neill paints throughout feel much less so. We feel like we've met them before in a cut-and-paste catalogue of Northern Irish eejits. There's his ma, obsessed with cleanliness; a pissed up Catholic priest in a gay relationship with the Nigerian GP; a lustily unfaithful bank manager's wife. O'Neill paints them with a tiring hyperactivity, and a tendency towards repetition ("Isn't that marvellous, isn't it? It's marvellous. Marvellous, isn't it?"), but it's apparent pretty early on that overracting can only ever gloss over cracks in the surface, not a wholesale lack of substance.

O'Neill is undoubtedly a talented writer, actor and comedian with an illustrious international career. But this particular outing has all the hallmarks of a Fringe veteran arriving in Edinburgh with the intention of just winging it. It hasn't worked.