Age hasn't mellowed Jenny Eclair; if anything, her material seems bluer than ever delivered by a 40-year-old mum. Still the only female winner of the Perrier and now a novelist to boot (aren't they all?), the doyenne of "twat chat" returns to Edinburgh as gleefully outré as ever.
Spread-eagled in an armchair, champagne in hand, Eclair's unstoppable hour recounts her (wildly exaggerated) experiences of growing old gracelessly. The comedy derives from our imagining Eclair's stage persona - foul-mouthed, sex-crazed uberbitch - transposed on to a series of middle-aged scenarios: 40th-birthday night out, parent-teacher association, passionless domesticity. It's all she can do to batten down her bitterness. But "laughter is the best medicine" she says. "Unless you've got thrush. You can't rub the Two Ronnies on that."
Of course, scatological, shock-value comedy is subject to the law of diminishing returns. By the time Eclair describes, in endoscopic detail, a home video she claims to have made of one bilious sexual incident, its picture is already overexposed. There remains, however, something liberating about Eclair's taboo-blind tirade, if only because she first refined the genre and still practises it with a twinkling self-irony that distinguishes her from the loud-mouthed crowd.
Glenn Close will never perform it Off-Broadway, which is a shame, but this vagina monologue never the less packs a dramatic punch.
Until August 27. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
