Bill Bailey's appearances are usually a Fringe highlight, so expectations were high as he piloted in for this one-week festival run of his new show, Steampunk. Sure enough, he's as smart and offbeat as ever, and his musical interludes are as intense a delight. But comedy fans weaned on the thrill of Bill may find him a little underpowered on this outing. He's not helped by the characterless, cavernous venue, which even acts as genial as Bailey will struggle to warm up.
It's a night when Bailey tantalises rather than satisfies. There are several examples of his flair for daft conceptual gymnastics, and he still makes comic capital from looking too seriously at trivial things: a Malteser in a packet of Revels becomes "a gastarbeiter in the unwieldy German metaphor of confectionery". I like the diffident way in which Bailey acknowledges this erudition to be faintly preposterous in a stand-up, while refusing to apologise. "It was Jean Baudrillard that invented postmodernism," he tells the front row. "Wasn't it?"
But the show fails (criminally, given its name) to build up any head of steam. Bailey meanders from Hollywood anecdotage (meeting Carrie Fisher) to off-kilter observations but seldom focuses or develops. And there isn't enough of what Bailey does best: musical comedy. The appetite is whetted by a jazz scat version of the Imperial March from Star Wars. But it isn't sated, least of all by a weak closing sequence, when Bailey animates photographs of world leaders so they seem to be singing Tainted Love. When he encores with a revival of an old musical favourite, his Kraftwerk spoof, Das Hokey Cokey, you're reminded of the brilliance to which Steampunk doesn't quite measure up.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0131-668 1688.
