Earlier this week, Harry Hill threw everything but the kitchen sink at his audience in a bid for laughs. Variety was the watchword, in all its senses. Ed Byrne is at the opposite comic extreme. It is just the Irishman, his cigarettes, and some things that have been happening in his life. There are times when those basic ingredients are all we need; Byrne can fashion laughs from the least auspicious raw material. But I found myself craving variety here too - over 90 minutes, the pitch, pace and purpose of Byrne's jittery observational humour start to feel unadventurous.There's no doubting Byrne has charisma, and a flair for comic turn of phrase. And while I would welcome a hundred-year moratorium on gender stereotypes, Byrne brings sex comedy to sparkier life than most. Witness his account of struggling to make sex last: "I think about my taxes so often with you, when my accountant phones, I get a hard-on." While the abuse he directs at an estranged girlfriend sometimes gets unpleasant, he extends the misogyny far enough to reveal its ridiculousness. On hearing Toni Braxton's woebegone anthem Unbreak My Heart, the cynical Byrne responds: "Un-nag my head, Toni."Over the show's hour and a half, Byrne might further develop this curmudgeonly persona. Too much of his set is given over to pedestrian observations on sex and social etiquette, statements of the obvious or about the unsubtlety of porn movie titles. Each might be the basis of satisfying routines if they were built upon, or twisted into unexpected shapes. Here, though, they're throwaway. The show's most successful sequence comes when Byrne steps away from this relentless rhythm to impersonate a racist miming brutal punishments through a restaurant window: first a knife slitting a throat, later a Loony Toons-style explosive being rigged. It suggests that Byrne has other weapons besides chirpy chatter in his armoury. He should use them more.· Until February 26. Box office: 0870 429 6883. Then touring.
