Susan Calman isn't the first standup to tell a coming-out story. But civil partnership anecdotes are a new addition to comedy's arsenal – and should prove a potent one, if Calman is any guide. Marriage (almost, if not quite) provides a peg for this effective set, in which the Scottish standup takes her own foibles as the subject. They're not specifically lesbian foibles: we've all got eccentricities a bit like hers. Which is her point, in a suddenly emotional ending that's somewhat out of kilter with the perky autobiographical shtick that's gone before.
The show's cracking start gives no indication of the seriousness to come. Calman describes selecting her John Lewis wedding list with her social-climbing mother in tow; then explains why walking down the aisle to the Proclaimers was forbidden – whereas Darth Vader's Death March was deemed perfectly acceptable.
The rest of the show is structured around Calman's nine Reasons Why No One Should Marry Me – most of which are tenuous excuses for self-reflexive comedy. Calman is a bit too insistent on her own wackiness, and uses a tired "mad cat lady" stereotype to establish it. And some of her routines are weaker than others. The dialogue she's cut and spliced between herself and her beloved DCI Jane Tennison (from TV's Prime Suspect) is funnier in conception than execution. But the story of her tweeds fad culminates in a terrific "reverse fox hunt" image on the mean streets of Glasgow. She ends with a plea for gay rights and equal marriage, the tearfulness of which seems incongruous, but whose validity – the more so after an hour in Calman's company – is screamingly obvious.
