Here's a bona fide Fringe eccentric. Andrew McClelland's comedy lecture made waves at the Melbourne festival, and it's easy to see why. McClelland is a foppish prof with a passion for pirates that borders on psychotic. He recalls the activities of Captain Kidd, Long John Silver and co with the fruity enthusiasm of some amphetamine-charged David Bellamy. Queue here to have pirate misconceptions corrected. They were not all named by conjoining "any colour, and the word beard". They were more likely to have syphilis than a peg leg. And pirate chronicler Captain Charles Johnson was decidedly not the same person as Daniel Defoe.
On this last point, McClelland gets extremely agitated, as if sodomy and the lash were being simultaneously applied. Sometimes, his lecture is guffaw-funny, thanks more to McClelland's manner than to his hit-and-miss material. But at least this is a comedian whose sense of humour is entirely his own. He takes sadistic delight in picking fault with an essay on pirates by an eight-year-old schoolboy. He recreates life in the Caribbean colonies using stick puppets and comedy Spanish accents. He can barely mention pirate wenches without succumbing to shrieking fantasy. But there weren't many of them. "Because in those days a sailor was supposed to be married to the sea. And the sea was very definitely not a lesbian." A curio to treasure.
· Until August 30. Box office: 0131-668 1633.
