"Stand-up will always be in Ed's career plan," runs the programme note, "but he also looks forward to seriously developing his acting career." It is the blight of comedy that its own practitioners see it as a staging post on a "career plan". Embarking on a two-week West End run, this popular Dublin stand-up displays a corresponding off-handedness towards his craft. "You're listening to a load of boring facts you're not interested in," he tells his crowd, "just because they're attached to jokes."
Ain't it so. There's nothing progressive about Byrne's schtick. This is quintessential observational comedy, and even when it is expertly deployed, he cannot quite disguise the flimsiness of the whole enterprise.
Of course, Byrne is good at what he does. There are moments when his convivial comedy of recognition invokes gasps of familiarity from the audience - he would not want to own any, but he will always use other people's bathroom scales. There's a mock-angry routine about a surly dental hygienist, and an observation that, because aikido fighters use their opponents' strength against them, he, the scrawny Byrne, must surely be unbeatable.
And so he flits blithely between subjects in pursuit of anything that will get a laugh. "It's easy to take the piss out of films," he says, and then proves it - for 10 minutes. His unmissable targets include Back to the Future and The Deep Blue Sea, which do not even have the virtue of topicality. The experiences to which he lays claim, and the few opinions that he expresses, frequently lack the ring of truth or conviction. They are in the act because they are funny, in the abstract. "If you don't hear laughter," Byrne jokes, "it's because I'm making a point." If only.
We are well into the second act before he articulates any strong feeling - and that's his horror at Westlife's bastardisation of a Queen song. And throughout it all, the comedian's traditionally laddish agenda is reinforced through stereotype-heavy cracks about sex and relationships, gays, performing in a "posh theatre" (whatever that means) and builders who never work but drink lots of tea. Byrne's most suggestive joke describes his frustration when his girlfriend recounts dreams that start as thrilling stories but never deliver. And that is how this brand of performance feels. Hopping at random between unrelated comic remarks, it thwarts our desire to go somewhere surprising or to discover anything compelling about the personality who might take us there.
Until September 22. Box office: 020-7369 1761.
