"Roseanne Barr in Leicester!" says support act Alan Carr. "Am I the only one who thinks there's been a mistake?" Ten years ago, Barr's two nights in the East Midlands, which launched the Leicester comedy festival, might have seemed more improbable still. But Roseanne's celebrity stock has slumped. "I know what you're wondering," she tells us, draped in a dressing gown and smirking mischievously. "What has a has-been of your magnitude been up to recently?"
The answer is: rediscovering her bite. After all, failure, far more than success, is fuel for Roseanne's gleeful misanthropy. Her stand-up career was revived when Michael Moore invited her on tour before the 2004 presidential election. And Moore's influence has rubbed off. Sure, we still get Roseanne the trailer-park Joan Rivers, discussing her looks, her diet and her men. The one-liners land like punches: thick, fast and frequently below the belt. "He said, 'When are we going to talk about our sexual problems?' Like I'm going to switch off Wheel of Fortune for that!"
But we also get an opinion about the world that cuts deeper than the regulation "Bush is a moron" wisecracks. The show takes as its theme Barr's proposition that armageddon is almost upon us. Religions contrive to argue while all saying the same thing: "Believe what we tell you, or burn in hell forever." We are ruled by hypocrites: the war against drugs is a "war against poor people on street drugs waged by rich people on prescription drugs".
Stood stock-still on stage, Barr does little, but a whole lot of personality comes across. And, perhaps surprisingly, warmth. There's no banter: the set is a tightly scripted monologue. The result may lack variety, or much spontaneity - apart from Roseanne's spoof Q&A at the end. But it shows that a shrewd comic intelligence has survived, and indeed prospered, through 10 years of failed cookery shows and "fascinating whistle-stops on the obscurity express".
