Readers of AL Kennedy's political columns will know that she's capable of a mean one-liner. But funny writing and funny performing are different things, as Kennedy is reminding herself in Edinburgh. She makes a brave stab at stand-up, and greets the audience's silence with heroic fortitude. But it would take more force of personality or comic skill than she possesses to conquer the tricky circumstances of this gig, which are that she is a moonlighting novelist on trial as a comedian, with the audience playing judge and sceptical jury.
Steamroller self-confidence and charm might have helped, but Kennedy starts with effortful attempts at ingratiation: "You lovely people," she calls us, unconvincingly. The show, she claims, is about word abuse - how language gets bullied and battered into meaningless shapes. In fact, she barely mentions the subject thereafter, and has nothing interesting to say about it. Instead, she meanders between political and personal chatter - much of which, material-wise, wouldn't disgrace a more experienced comic. The fact that one side-effect of exposure to depleted uranium is "caustic semen" is comedy gold, but Kennedy never makes it glitter. I liked her observation that airports demonstrate how the government would like to treat us all of the time. More predictable is her talk of smear tests and breasts - mandatory subjects, she says, for a female comic; I wish she had dared to buck the trend.
But the material never really sings. Kennedy's comic timing is faulty - some jokes are only discernible by the uncomfortable hush that follows them. Others never make it as far as a punchline. When they do, her voice tends to taper into an almost inaudible squeak - a verbal tic that unhelpfully suggests she wishes she could disappear into a little hole in the wall. I suspect most of her audience identified with the feeling.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131-558 7272.
