Justin Edwards is best known for his monstrous children's entertainer alter ego, Jeremy Lion - nominated for last year's Perrier Award. Lion fans, and those who follow his urbane sketch troupe The Consultants, will know that he's also a mean comic songwriter. His new show, Unaccompanied As I Am, presents Edwards un-costumed, unplugged (almost), and tripping through a dozen songs, sometimes on an acoustic guitar and at other times, less wisely, with technological accompaniment.
I attended the show with high hopes and vivid memories of a song Edwards sang with The Consultants four years ago. It reappears in this set, and is still his best, a Noel Coward-alike ditty of bibliophile passion that recounts a romance in bookish puns: 'had I been too Thomas fool-Hardy?', 'we fell JK Rowling to the floor,' etc. This is the kind of wordplay assault-and-battery that dizzies you with delight, and Edwards repeats the trick elsewhere, notably with several one-liners reinventing the Dean Martin classic: 'when you tie up your boat / Just to keep it afloat / That's a mooring.'
When the star attraction is pert linguistic trickery, Edwards is terrific - witness a song he sets in the very bar where all the 'I walked into a bar' jokes take place. The show's less successful efforts come when the wordplay is conspicuous by its absence (as with one number about Hi-de-Hi star Paul Shane, whose premise is funnier than its execution) or barely intelligible (in one instance, drowned out by a pre-recorded doo-wop backing track).
I prefer it when Edwards remains, as his title promises, unaccompanied - even by his own voice on playback. He tries to woo a female punter with a serenade that starts romantically and ends with him threatening to pickle her heart. It's one of two numbers that summons the spirit of Jeremy Lion, the second being a kiddies' TV theme, illustrated by cartoons, about an alien child called Beakus wreaking havoc in a fairytale wood. There's some lovely stuff here, the more so (as is often the case) when least encumbered by technology.
· Until Aug 28. Box office 0131 556 6550.
