Dr Earnest Parrot is head of the Institute of Advanced Personhood, and she has diagnosed Demetri Martin with an illness called "pheals". Instead of engaging with real life (according to the doctor), this New York stand-up spends too much time in a "brain nook" hovering above his head, where Premise Pixies frolic in the Forest of Jokes, and whole days come and go in Procrasti Nation. Tonight, Martin is undergoing treatment by reprising five moments in his life that will remind him how to connect with reality.
That's the idea - and it's more tenuous than the two shows with which Martin made his name. This is a self-absorbed set about the comic's self-absorption. Stand-ups, says Martin, often feel like spectators of, rather than participants in, the world. An interesting observation, but one which is only loosely related to most of the show's material, as arbitrary as in last year's battery of one-liners, These Are Jokes.
But Martin is still the most cerebral stand-up on the circuit, and his quips come in unlikely shapes and sizes. They may be wacky abstractions, deployed to the blissed-out strumming of an acoustic guitar: "If I ever saw an amputee being hanged, I would just yell out letters." They may be high-concept doodles on the upstage screen: scratchy, David Shrigley-style cartoons with brain-twisting punchline captions. And there's a section devoted to lesser-known mythical beasts, including the Vertimaid, a mermaid divided vertically rather than at the waist.
Sometimes Martin's self-examination finally yields only platitudes about being true to oneself. But it's conducted with such a surfeit of geek creativity that it's easy to be seduced. Dr Parrot diagnoses "overactive imaginationary glands", for which terrible syndrome let's hope Martin never finds a cure.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0870 745 3083.
