Say the first thing that comes into your head, runs the golden rule of improv. That's easier said than done, and Terry Alderton's manic standup show dramatises the difficulty. The Southend comic's trademark tic is to turn upstage and discuss his show's progress with the voices inside his head. Have I alienated the crowd? Should I not have said that? It's a neat device, which provides meta-theatrical laughs, as well as colouring Alderton's hyperactive, shape-shifting standup with a shade of emotional and mental collapse.
The effect is to lay bare the experience of performing standup, which is nothing if not a neurotic one. Alderton's loudest inner voice is that of a rasping demon, remonstrating when he quips out of turn, yet urging him to pursue his most ill-advised instincts. Sure enough, this bald, buff and barbed comic takes the set in some questionable directions: the jokes about midgets, for example, I could live without. But it's a price I'll pay for seat-of-its-pants standup that takes risks, hurtling off in unexpected directions while decorum struggles to keep up.
An unusual mix of traditional club comic and experimentalist, Alderton alights at observational humour only to mock it – as with a battle-of-the-sexes spoof about male and female approaches to binary numbers. Elsewhere, it's all silly dancing, loopy audience interaction and microphone-mauling vocal effects: Alderton does a mean Formula One soundscape, where the facial expressions out-funny the spot-on noises. There is also an exchange with a Bombay call-centre worker alert to his supporting role in a comedy show; and a dialogue between Alderton's shoes, which recalls the great Dutch absurdist Hans Teeuwen in its incongruity, and in the skill with which these speaking sneakers are brought to life. Like Teeuwen, Alderton at his best is unstable and deliciously unexpected.
