Irish stand-up Jason Byrne is a ringmaster of chaos, and the punters are his performing animals. Some comics try to be friends with their audience. Byrne sets up an oppositional relationship, berating them for getting in the way of his show, and in the process, making their supposed unruliness its subject. It is a remarkable skill, although it is stretched a bit thin here over two hours in an 800-seat West End theatre.
The audience-baiting begins early, with Byrne grumpily restarting his show for the benefit of latecomers - then restarting it over and over again. From here on, his exasperation grows ever more splenetic, but when it abates his scripted material is exposed. There are bog-standard battle-of-the-sexes jokes ("blokes are disgusting, aren't we?"), jokes about his seven-year-old son ("he says the maddest shit all the time"), and jokes about marriage that conjure the "take my wife" spirit of Les Dawson.
Some of these are as funny as they are well-worn: I liked his depiction of marriage as like two heavyweight boxers slugging it out in the 12th round. And his anecdote about playing the Royal Variety performance has great moments, as when he has to follow a pyrotechnic spectacular from Meatloaf, then is introduced to Charles and Camilla - who, to the drunken Byrne, "looks like two forks, a loaf of bread, and a single". The highlight of the set, though, is a Tommy Cooper-ish levitation sequence, in which Byrne's flair for nonsense and his love/hate relationship with the audience are gloriously united.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0870 890 1101.
