It's the 150th anniversary of Darwin's The Origin of Species, and ventriloquist Nina Conti is uniquely placed to comment. Only she, after all, has intimate experience of "a talking monkey who I believe is the missing link between man and ape". In her new show, Conti promises a lecture on species evolution, and delivers a riff on personal evolution, which sees her and her beloved puppet, Monkey, embark on solo careers after 25 years together. The result is a multilayered adventure in voice-throwing, the lowest of which is a bassline of smut that Conti, however much she evolves, never quite strikes from her act.
The Darwin material is exhausted early on, as Monkey ascribes his origins to a liaison between Sean Connery and an oven glove. We move on to Freud, whom Conti invokes to explain her split personality: why has she franchised out the funny, filthy part of her brain to a hand-puppet? There's a choice moment (typical of Conti's mind-bending take on ventriloquism) when the psychoanalyst Monkey puts his patient Conti to sleep, then - beautiful pause - realises he can no longer speak. Conti then produces a miniature version of her father, the actor Tom Conti, who - in a weird act of chain voice-throwing - manipulates daughter and doll into going their separate ways.
This combination of daftness and sophistication is highly appealing. Too bad that Conti (or is it Monkey?) can't shake the compulsive puerility. There's nothing wrong in principle with the sequence in which Conti takes up erotic dancing and ventriloquises her own prosthetic breasts. But it's crudely done; likewise the moment when she and Monkey reconcile by having puppet sex.
Here's hoping that Conti's rug-pulling experiments in ventriloquism evolve and prosper, while the potty-mouthed shtick dies out, by means of natural selection or otherwise.
