Sean Hughes: Penguins

Small-scale national treasure Sean Hughes commands a friendly mid-evening audience who are willing him to do well. We’re assaulted with numerous gimmicks in the first five minutes; an over-sized buzz-wire game spelling FAIL, a box that delivers snippets of his stories, a child’s wooden block game and Hughes himself in a woollen dress. Like the crowded stage, there are various narrative threads to this show that are wedged together with the aim of alleviating our regrets, of coming to terms with failure. A cast of characters is introduced and interwoven through stories of Hughes’s youth and his recent breakup.

This is a busy show. Building on his considerable standup experience, he’s stretching himself here. He’s reaching for genuine emotion and the whole spectacle is admirable.

But there’s something wholly unsatisfying about it. The humour is tame and shines through too infrequently. More so, there’s a certain clunkiness to these various storytelling devices. It's delivered at a great rate, but the unstoppable momentum only heaps in more detail, more noise; it infuses little extra in the way of laughs, so in truth it’s only serving to dull the clarity of the piece.

What’s worse is the sense of going through the motions; it feels trite to hear Beckett dumped in amongst it all, making it almost parodic of the typical theme-heavy, emotion-laden Edinburgh show, without the bite. Rounded off with an inevitable, yet baffling section of callbacks, you can’t dislike Hughes’s comedy but it's certainly not loveable here either.