Hotly tipped as this year's newcomer to watch, Andrew Lawrence strikes me as a comic with plenty yet to learn. As the title of his show, How to Butcher Your Loved Ones, suggests, he isn't trying to be the new Adam Hills. This twisted set describes Lawrence's bid to wreak revenge on the life that has wronged him. On the mother who scorned his efforts in high school art class. On his abusive, wheelchair-bound dad. On the cruel fate that dictated he should be ginger - which is something to be regretted, apparently.
Lawrence delivers all this in a strangulated, nervy voice that barely keeps full-blown psychosis at bay. It's a compelling performance, like Freddie Krueger in the mind and spindly body of a schoolboy, and it's admirably sustained. But the material doesn't measure up. In practice, Lawrence's murderous stage persona serves mainly as an excuse for tedious obscenity and childish efforts to shock.
And so we listen, with gritted teeth, while Lawrence tells us how he beat up a midget, asks a man in the audience 'can I stick my winkle up your bumhole?' and sings about a maggot-ridden corpse sitting on his face. These aren't jokes, as such. There aren't punchlines, so much as climactic images of filth. His songs, too, which showcase Lawrence's terrific bluesy voice, are strenuously obscene but lyrically witless. The effort to disgust is far greater than the effort to surprise, subvert or indeed create a credible comic character.
With this debut, Lawrence proves he can paint vivid word-pictures of smut and viscera. But, having done so, can he then do anything intelligent, unexpected or funny with them?
· Until Aug 31. Box office 0131 556 6550.
