There's no Doctor Brown onstage for the first 10 minutes of his new show Becaves – and when he does make his presence felt, it's thrashing invisibly behind the curtain to the music from the Old Spice advert. It's a deliciously unpredictable start to an idiosyncratic hour from the American silent comic – real name Philip Burgers – which resoundingly justifies his growing cult fame. This is classic physical comedy (Burgers trained at the renowned clown-theatre school École Philippe Gaulier), given such a twist by Burgers's opaque charisma and taste for the non-sequitur that it feels like something entirely new.
On this occasion, his whole show plays out to a (justified) soundtrack of uncontrollable hysteria from two young women in the front row. It's the kind of intrusion that can derail a performance, but Burgers accommodates it with delicacy and skill. Those are his hallmarks: dressed like a mandarin, his face obscured behind a stoner's bushy beard, he keeps a watchful eye on his audience at all times while – with minute physical precision – engaging in one or another nonsensical activity. Now he plays grandmother's footsteps to a mariachi soundtrack. Now he performs Peking Opera – or at least he would, but his parasol keeps getting stuck.
But there's nothing fey about Doctor Brown – he's part mime artist, part lord of misrule. The Peking Opera skit ends with a bizarre act of transubstantiation, as Burgers climbs inside the body of the (imaginary) woman he's been fingering – then radiates priceless confusion when trying to work out where she's gone. Elsewhere, he takes the clown's traditional bashful flirtation with an audience member, and ratchets it into full-blown sexual molestation. You sit in the front row at your peril.
There's danger latent, then, in his faux-innocent horseplay – and Burgers could be more judicious about giving it vent. The character's sexual threat, and a closing nude sequence, are where Doctor Brown gets his cheapest laughs. He doesn't need them. There's already enough, in his combination of clowning, oddity and low-level menace, to constitute one of the funniest shows on the fringe.
