There are two Rob Newmans. One is the iconic, Byron-beautiful lad who told beery jokes at Wembley with David Baddiel. The other - the loftier "Robert" - is the bloated and somehow damaged figure who lectures us on environmental politics. Both alter egos are in evidence here.
Newman speaks about his younger self as a "backstreet driver of the psyche" and refers darkly to mental illness. The fallout from Baddiel has obviously transformed him, but when Newman is forced into delivering saucy monologues from the Mary Whitehouse Experience, you wonder if he will ever be able to move on completely.
The troubled comic's big dilemma is how to sustain politics when crowds are yearning for beer and fag jokes. He pushes the crowd as far as he can go (discussing the Reclaim the Streets marches, the Paris Commune) before reining them in again with a killer punchline. This generally works because Newman is a terrific storyteller, and has become a master of the educationally hilarious one-liner. A GM food mutated by pesticides, for example, is "the Shaun Ryder of the botanical world".
His challenge now is to make the politics as memorable as the punchlines. He takes a huge gamble by closing the set with a message about corporate fear of massed action that contains no humour at all, but Newman is almost alone now in teaching us that comedy can be about much more than laughter.
Ends tomorrow. Box office: 0131-226 2428.
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