Tim FitzHigham: Hellfire

Scary-eyed adventurer Tim FitzHigham is one of those acts who squeezes every last drop of juice from an Edinburgh jaunt. This year he’s also presiding over the late night mock courtroom drama This is your Trial with Thom Tuck, then the even later storytelling session IndieRound, with Bob Slayer, and more besides. Which does beg the question: is Tim spreading himself a bit thin?

Well, if he’s shattered it isn’t showing, yet. Onstage the energetic comic is a man possessed, or—as he readily admits—a man obsessed, returning each year with a new show devoted to some ludicrous new challenge. We know about the previous instalments because every few minutes he does a quick audience survey to find out who saw them (with increasingly muted responses for more recent escapades, perhaps tellingly).

This year’s title refers to The Hellfire Club, the infamously secretive and sordid gentlemen’s establishment. FitzHigham gets wrapped up in its history via an anonymous arcane letter, which takes him on a slightly baffling treasure hunt, from the ocean off Oman to the wilds of West Wycombe, then a slightly tacked-on sporting challenge.

The problem with this premise—and with many quest-based shows, in truth—is the strong suspicion that the protagonist’s prime motivation was accumulating more material, which massively dilutes any potential peril. After an often illuminating first half, Hellfire descends into a disjointed rush between scenes, that frenetic delivery failing to distract from the general pointlessness. It’s hard to care about a chap’s travails when you can’t fathom why he was there in the first place.