Guy Dartnell's latest show is exactly what it says it is: an account of his 19-year-old self travelling around France and trying to lose his virginity. Yet the virginity in question is not just sexual. This is a show about the panic of learning to be a grown-up, finding the balance between recklessness and timidity and discovering that things seldom turn out quite as you had imagined they would. The anticipated big moments so often end with a whimper rather than a bang.
It is a very pleasant 85 minutes and would slip down more easily still if it were a quarter of an hour shorter. But, like so many solo storytelling shows, Travels With My Virginity never finds the format to justify its delivery in the theatre, rather than over a pint in the pub. In Dartnell's previous work, the story has been only part of the package, and because of that the narrative has emerged from Dartnell's vocal improvisations in unexpected and interestingly layered ways. Here, it is the main event, and although it meanders all across France, it is strictly linear. Even the 1970s soundtrack isn't integrated into the piece to maximum effect.
Perhaps the problem is that the show, as Dartnell informs us in the programme, is intended as a pitch to film executives. Do people normally invite the public to pay to attend such pitches? This show is a good example of why they shouldn't.
Still, Dartnell just about gets by on a mixture of sheer niceness and deceptively clever technique. He tells his story with such a lack of guile that you get a pimples-and-all portrait of a self-obsessed callow youth, who is, as he says with 25 years' worth of hindsight, "so different from me, yet so clearly me".
· At the Merlin Theatre, Frome (01373 465 949), on October 29. Then touring.
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