Years ago, Stuart Silver was one half of Noble and Silver, Britain's most provocative (OK, its only) art-comedy double act. Then Kim Noble went solo, with an appallingly funny docu-comedy about his suicidal depression. And now Silver is launching his own one-man career, with a slice of ambient absurdism centring on disillusioned adulthood and the late-capitalist world.
It's not, in any conventional sense, comedy. Silver stands in a pool of light with a ukulele in his hand. He muses about time, speed and distance; about the secret of living in the moment; about the emptiness of our desire to be noticed and known. But this is no chat. His thoughts come packaged as dream-logic; concepts fold in on themselves, so that empathy itself becomes dysfunctional, since the empathiser, in seeing things from another point of view, is less able to see things from his own. And David Hasselhoff, who sang at the fall of the Berlin Wall, somehow becomes, by extension, the demolisher of the Twin Towers.
Naff namechecks notwithstanding, the blissed-out, cerebral vibe recalls US comic Demetri Martin with his palindromes and self-help systems; but Silver is less interested in, and makes less play for, the straightforward laugh. He offers up this monologue beadily, with an eyebrow cocked and a smile on his lips. Laughs would be nice, but he's quite happy with our perplexity, which may be the sane response, after all, to his inventory of modern alienation.
In fact, the performance might be better enjoyed on CD: Silver often retreats into fierce, finger-picking uke music, and his cerebral text would benefit from multiple listens. But Silver's stock-take of the spirit of 21st-century life remains a surreptitiously seductive experience.
