Tim Key: Single White Slut

Unveiling Single White Slut at the Fringe following a trial run last year and series of London dates, Tim Key has every reason to look pleased with himself. Strolling his vast stage in a denim onesie, cowboy boots and unkempt beard, affecting bemusement about what we've all gathered for, it's tricky to define this show beyond an extended, elaborate tease.

Ostensibly about beds, and his efforts to get women into them, he reflects upon a committed post-gig seduction, a clinical transaction in Sochi and an awkwardly negotiated threesome in India, inbetwixt concocting a playful fantasy sequence with Anne Hathaway on the set of One Day. Lest we forget, the Alan Partridge sidekick is now a film star, this once marginalised versifier now the smug, self-confident face of a so-called poetry boom. In actuality, his signature clipped poems play a reduced role this time round, subsumed into the broader, inexplicable collage. And his crude appeals to laddishness ring deliberately hollow, not unsettling so much as just off. Wrong-footing his audience has become Key's mojo, as with those he coaxes onstage to share his bed. But also, subtly, in his deceptively precise language and the theatrics he employs to add a further, dream-like quality to the piece's measured pace and mood.

Occasionally, there's a suggestion of the Emperor's New Clothes, his capricious discursions into owls and such like. But these reinforce the bathos of a performance that knows when to flirt with the mundane. Rich, strange and ambitious, Key has delivered another novelty suffused with sly intent and mischievous wit.