Natalie Haynes used to be a teacher, but was sacked for sleeping with her pupils - or so she tells us. Having developed a reputation on the stand-up circuit for outré material (all the more shocking, apparently, from a middle-class woman), Haynes brings her first solo show to Edinburgh rather too pleased with her own supposed fearlessness. Her publicity leads us to expect a supercool bitch leaving shattered taboos in her wake. In fact she is a ball of eager-to-please nervous energy who apologises for abbreviating spastic to spaccer and practically flagellates herself for cracking a joke about conjoined twins.
That is not to detract from Haynes's considerable appeal, however. Unlike so many of her colleagues, she is happy to wear her erudition on her sleeve (several attacks on easy targets). She sometimes dares to be informative as well as funny, on subjects ranging from the computer pioneer Alan Turing to the efficacy of helium as a suicide aid. "Everyone else wants cheers or rounds of applause," she says. "I just want you to go: 'Really?' "
The theme of her show, Six Degrees of Desolation, is pretty tenuous. Her second degree, Homelessness, refers not to a period living in a cardboard box, but to a time when her ex-boyfriend expelled her from their communal pad. The whole desolation, I'm-so-cynical-about-life shtick is undermined by Haynes's admission that she is in love. But there is mileage in this likable combination of intelligence, anxiety and lurches into juvenile provocation.
· Until August 26. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
