A cult comedian in the US, Margaret Cho makes her London debut with a show that recalls a placard seen at Hyde Park's anti-war demo last year: Lesbians Against Bush. As a Korean-American bisexual, Cho is well placed to speak on behalf of the underdog. For this set, titled State of Emergency, that involves scattergun attacks on the Bush administration (always a crowd-pleaser at UK gigs) alongside routines cherry-picked from her previous, award-winning stage shows.
Some of the latter are showing their age. Several skits in which Cho's Korean mother reacts in strangulated English to her daughter's sexuality are too obvious. Much of Cho's gay material seems more calibrated to the US, where gay rights require a particularly strident defence. But I liked the glee with which she imagines Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter hidden away before the US election, "being taught by the secret services how to suck cock".
Several of the evening's highlights are generated with just such candour, and delivered in a furious squawk for which Cho's mild appearance provides no warning. An expressive physicality, meanwhile, partly offsets her tendency to overextend her jokes. Reacting to the offer of an Asian chicken salad on an aeroplane, she twists her whole body into samurai shape: "This is not the salad of my people!"
In orientalism, she finds rich comic pickings: discussing her fear of childbirth, Cho proposes "adopting one of those baby girls from China. 'Cos really, who's gonna know?" Her material on US politics is less insightful and more predictable, although there are some barbs about the culture at large. On western perceptions of women under Islam, she says: "At least in Afghanistan, they get to be fat." In a show that too often preaches to the converted, gags like these may yet convert a few to the cult of Cho.
· Until January 1. Box office: 0870 033 2626.
