Tim Clare: How to Be a Leader

“How to know how to learn how to get leadership skills” is the suitably long-winded lesson promised by comedian and performance poet Tim Clare’s latest Fringe offering. Save for groaning slightly under the weight of its over-elaborate conceit, it's more fun than any hour spent in the company of a man with PowerPoint and a laser pen really ought to be.

In six easy steps, Clare maps out the path to power taken by everyone from suicide cult leader Jim Jones (cue brilliant Facebook gag) to former Democratic Republic of Congo president Mobutu Sese Seko (whose “infantile lies” extended to claiming to walk with a cane twice the density of the earth’s core). Among his tips are “never let ‘em see you bleed” and “have magic powers”, the latter of which yields the best section of the show, an email exchange with a real life rent-a-witch who promises to make Clare basically omnipotent for three hundred quid.

He could do with scripting less and performing more dynamically, but the incredible quantity of thought and research that has gone into How to Be a Leader has to be saluted. The same goes for his determination not to “pick from the tree of low-hanging fruit”, i.e. make jokes about Messrs Cameron, Clegg and Osborne. Gladly, though, Thatcher is fair game and Clare turns her into a trailblazing female from history who, along with Joan of Arc, Elizabeth I and Emily Wilding Davison, becomes the subject of a priceless, climactic rap. It's a sequence that proves more fun and impressive than any pasty-faced white man rhyming like Ice Cube has any right to be.