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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Brian Logan

Demetri Martin

Perrier Award-winner Demetri Martin returns with a show that's just as idiosyncratic as, and more heartfelt than, last year's If I. On his Fringe debut, he detailed the almost autistic compulsions that came to dominate his life. In its follow-up, Martin undertakes "corporeal neuro-projection", and materialises inside his own notebook. He then journeys through these scribbled pages, revisiting memories of his marriage and divorce while a struggling young comedian in New York.

Martin really commits to his notebook motif, and the show acquires a through-the-looking-glass quality that's highly seductive. Martin's narrative, meanwhile, isn't comedy in any conventional sense. It's storytelling. And the tale coalesces into a tender apology to the wife he alienated, told with generosity of spirit and his trademark cerebral curiosity.

The performance never builds up a head of steam: Martin is softly spoken bordering on blissed out. But one section here gloriously rebuts the charge that he's not a comedian. Delivered while plucking sweetly at a guitar, his A-Z of one-liners (on the women who dance in cages on MTV videos: "I do want freedom, but I'm going to put rhythm above it") is a comic masterclass. This is a triumphant return.

· Until August 29. Box office: 0131-226 2428.

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