The last time US comic Doug Stanhope performed in London, he phoned his sick mum from the stage to check if she was dead yet. This time he tells us, with jokes, how he recently assisted her suicide. Stanhope blasts a hole through to the existential void. If he's no longer the bruised, idealistic firebrand of five years ago, he still dredges electrifying comedy from the badlands of unsentimental despair.
Tonight's best routine, as tragic as it is hilarious, is about Stanhope's impotence as a comedian. He no longer has "social relevance", he tells us, because he spent years trying to right the world's wrongs, and nothing changed. Cue a jeering roleplay in which Stanhope plays his fans endorsing his opinions, then cravenly excusing themselves for not putting them in to practice. Stanhope hates their pusillanimity, and hates himself for wishing to change things. In this feedback loop of pointless loathing, a dark laughter thrives.
It's because he's lost hope, says Stanhope, that his standup is getting worse. I wish I could persuade him otherwise. After all, he clearly still cares. In his comments, say, about comedian Mitch Hedberg's death from heroin ("It killed him, but it didn't destroy his life"), his passion is manifest. But so is his cynicism – most depressingly, in an old routine about manipulative women and their violent men. One breathtaking rant, in which Stanhope vents his everyday frustrations with the use of castor oil, a rat cage and a spinning dildo, reminds us of the freewheeling articulacy of which this still-thrilling comic is capable.
Until 11 September. Box office: 0844 847 2475.
