Aged 10, Isy Suttie released a balloon from her garden, with a plea for a pen pal inside. She hoped it would reach Australia – but instead, it reached 25-year-old Dave two doors down the road. So (according to her new show), began a lifelong friendship, in which the minstrel-comedian and her former neighbour swap tales of their malfunctioning love lives. Suttie's show, a real gem, intercuts episodes from her own romantic history with the story of Dave and Pearl. Pearl is an unhappily married Surreyite whose boxed-up heart Dave prises loose. It's soppy as heck, charmingly so – and Suttie's eye for revealing detail yields plenty of laughs.
It's a more mature piece than its 2007 predecessor, in which Suttie steps out from behind the Alan Bennett-isms and shows us a little of herself. She talks us through her disastrous relationships, with which she persevered in defiance of the bad signs – her boyfriend colouring her hand black with a pen while she slept, for example. In such details, one detects the tang of lived experience. The same quality abounds in Pearl and Dave's story, as when Pearl speaks sadly of her husband "going to strip clubs when his team wins, because apparently they serve real ale".
After a tentative seduction by Facebook, Pearl herself is soon stripping – for Dave. Her shy shedding of inhibition and his gruff inarticulacy (he sounds like John Shuttleworth) are beautifully caught by Suttie, usually in word-dense songs underscored by sparkly acoustic guitar. One of them rhymes "Sambuca" with "rebuke her", which is impossible to dislike. The standup sections on Suttie's own love life are overshadowed by this tender tale of old-fashioned sweethearts in a new-fangled world. By the end, we're hooked on it less because it's funny – which it is – but because it's lovely.
