Frankie Boyle makes back to basics seem like a good idea. There are no gimmicks to this hour-long set, the full Fringe debut of the Mock the Week star. It's just the pink-suited Boyle releasing hard-boiled Glaswegian one-liners into the Edinburgh atmosphere like corpses tipped into the Clyde. These are jokes that make a splash - but stand too close, you'll get showered with muck.
Boyle is unashamedly Scottish. In fact, he's not ashamed of anything, least of all holding up his home country to ridicule. This is the comic expression of that national self-loathing we Scots have turned into a national sport. On the cold climate: "having a gangbang in Scotland is like playing pass the parcel." On the government's education drive: "you can't get Scottish 17-year-olds to go to school. Who's going to pick up their kids from primary?" And on tourism: "The people of Falkirk have come up with a wheel - just 2,000 years after every other fucker came up with it. What next, the Motherwell Fire?"
If you're worried I'm spoiling all Boyle's best gags, never fear. He's got scores of them, delivered laconically and punctuated only by cynical chuckles from the man himself. On some subjects, cynicism is the only appropriate response: ID cards, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the career of model-novelist-whatever Jordan. But Boyle doesn't come across as mean-spirited; he, and we, are enjoying ourselves too much for that. And there's something redeeming in the brilliancy of Boyle's ear for the absurd, and in the word-pictures he fashions from our cultural dross. A faulty door on a train toilet sees him "unveiled like a prize on a quiz show." Bad cunnilingus is "a hungry child wearing oven gloves trying to get beetroot out of a jar." This is meat-and-potatoes stand-up, but the sauce is tart, the meat's bleeding and the spuds are hard as rock.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131 556 6550.
