Imagine you've learned to speed read, and you're getting through all those books you wanted to read. In one evening. With laughs. Judging from his erudition, and from a sleeveless cardie that's seen better years, Robert Newman has been squatting in the history section of a particularly draughty second-hand bookshop.Now, the novelist and stand-up emerges on to the stage with a new show, Apocalypso Now, encompassing 18th-century revolutionary politics, ukulele music and the exhaustion of the world's energy supplies. You don't know whether to laugh, or start storing hydrogen.Of course, this being Newman, it's about more than laughter. He knows how to offset jokes and hard facts. He'll end a routine on a downbeat if it makes a telling point. To embody his "euro-dollar theory of the war", he enacts a comic drama that casts the US as a mafia enforcer unable to subdue lippy Venezuela while inflicting "a very public punishment beating" on Iraq.I find those pro-people, anti-power arguments compelling - not least because Newman bolsters them with colourful historical incident. He throws current security concerns into relief with a tale of how Pitt the Younger's government tapped up Wordsworth as a terrorist. This was a time when "the least spark will set [the people] ablaze", quotes Newman, and then describes the riot that greeted the first public appearance of the top hat. Amid the erudition, Newman retains a healthy appetite for silliness: witness his 19th-century vaudeville routine derived from the names of the Chinese prime minster and president, Wen and Hu.While broaching humanity's energy crisis, Newman isn't in complete control of his own show's energy, which sometimes lapses with his fickle concentration. But that's a minor matter in an evening that reclaims politics from the propagandists and, a week after the election, celebrates history's greatest secret: "We change things, not parliament." The apocalypse has never been so entertaining.· Until May 21. Box office: 0207 328 1000.
