Ten minutes into his comedy routine, playwright Alex Johnston produces an amorphous Lego object: this is meant to symbolise the structure of the show, complete with a gap representing "ironic distance". Somewhere in the course of his 90-minute monologue, he forgets to mind the gap.
Johnston's script and performance capture the studied strategies of the stand-up comedian; Entertainment is both a homage to and a parody of an art form that is already saturated in parody. In this show - a series of gags and anecdotes, directed by Jimmy Fay with fine attention to comic timing - Johnston tackles the staples of religion and politics. Anti-US and anti-Catholic rants are delivered with the requisite degree of righteous indignation, culminating in a Swiftian "modest proposal" entailing the export of obese American children to Iraq to be turned into kebabs.
"It's hard to work out what's OK to say and what's not," Johnston muses disingenuously at one point, proceeding to tell Nazi gags - "to see if there are jokes that nobody would laugh at" - and risking an anti-gay story from his schooldays.
Running through his act is a dialogue with his late father, a Lutheran, about morality: whether actions matter, whether it is possible to do good, to be good. He seems concerned about this - or is he? He may be having a crisis on stage, but then again this could be one of his routines.
Johnston has brilliantly observed the smoke-screens, the get-out clauses, the evasions and multiple ironies of the form, where the raconteur always wins, and language and "stories" are used to maintain distance between people rather than communicate.
In the midst of so much knowingness, the satire's target gets lost. Like many stand-up routines, this dribbles to a close long after it should. Whatever happened to that piece of Lego?
· Until September 30. Box office: 00 353 1 881 9613.
