Dancer steps into the breach

Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJJ Phil Wang has been gradually refining his stand-up but raises his reputation significantly here with the irresistible Kinabalu, allying his lightly-worn intelligence to post-colonial insight and an instinctive capacity for silliness. The latter arrived with his distinctive surname, which he has always tossed around with goofy abandon. And he applies something similar here to “lube”.

Having his sexy cake and eating it, his smugly assured, even arrogant persona hails his recent supermarket purchase as a defining point in a man’s life, even as he acknowledges its potential for embarrassment. The erotic import of the item is of decidedly secondary importance to the sonorous qualities of pronouncing it though, as he rolls variations around his tongue in a delightful display of wordplay.

His daft credentials established, Wang is free to explore his ethnic identity and defend the British Empire without seeming worthy or controversial if approaching a taboo line. That’s significant, given that the second truly memorable routine in this dense hour involves him casting his head back and delivering a “ching chong” stream of stereotypical, supposedly Chinese gibberish, admittedly with himself as the scenario’s idiot.

Well aware that his Jamaican friends feel differently about the Empire’s legacy, this son of a Chinese-malaysian man and English woman who met in Borneo, he nevertheless owes his very existence to it. Raised in Malaysia, with its mix of Malay, Chinese and Indians, he has developed a nuanced appreciation of race which informs such potentially tricky situations as a trip to a Japanese barbers.

No such special insight is required for him to be piqued by the BBC Asian Network perpetually ignoring him though, its focus on the Indian subcontinent tolerable until he’s leapfrogged by Afro-caribbean acts.

Poignant on his parents’ weird courtship, Wang is hilariously prideful about his own mixed-race relationship, capping an hour of perfectly intertwined personalpolitical belly laughs. JAY RICHARDSON Assembly George Square Studios (17) JJJJ He holds the Guinness World Record for most feet taps per second (38, smashing Michael Flatley’s record of 35) but when James Devine hobbles onto the stage on crutches at the start of Velocity: Rising , it’s clear we won’t be seeing that today. Such is the way of the Fringe, tragedy has struck, with James not only losing his mother in late July (the show is dedicated to her) but spraining his ankle in rehearsal at the start of this run.

And yet, this is one of the best dance hours you could spend in Edinburgh this August. Stepping into the breach is David Geaney, a World Irish Dance Champion five times over, semifinalist on this year’s Britain’s Got Talent and the heir apparent to Flatley’s throne – and he is only 22. He and Devine formed Velocity and devised the show together, but Geaney adapted it at the last minute.

The result is a wonderful, fast-paced and utterly joyful display of Irish dancing. Geaney is a phenomenal dancer, lightning fast, bursting with energy and amiable with the crowd. Devine visits the stage twice, to tap dance sitting down, allowing the first class musicianship of the small live band to help him make the most of what he can offer until his ankle heals.

Dancer Anne Marie Keaney, drafted in at the last minute, also helps to shake things up, with a mix of hard and soft shoe dancing. Backed by guitar, percussion, sax, fiddle and DJ, the movement never misses a beat, while a video on the backscreen gives audiences a fascinating potted history of dance in Ireland.

In truth, this is a five -star show compromised down to a four – and anyone with even a passing interest in Irish dance and tap should buy themselves an hour in Velocity’s company. KELLY APTER

0 David Geaney and James Devine formed Velocity, but injured Devine now has a limited role in this show New Town Theatre (Venue 7) JJJ With a philosopher’s soul and immaculate mastery of language, Kevin Mcaleer makes you reappraise the ways that comedians can approach their presentation and lexicon. Despite the unpromising target of mindfulness gurus, his spoof spiritual mentor is a mild-mannered delight, the veteran Northern Irish comic’s relaxed, dry delivery and lean, elegantly crafted script loaded with memorable aphorisms and droll pastiches of vacant platitude, a poetry of cracked nonsense.

Softly spoken, still and unhurried, virtually to the point of lullabying hypnosis, Mcaleer’s grandiloquent claims for his programme are all the more effective for eschewing the bombast of most evangelical self-help shysters, his satire on figures like Deepak Chopra and the Dalai Lama presented with soft, sub-textual reproach. Sat static and Zen-like for the entirety of the hour, there’s a slight shift in emphasis as he moves from outlining the course to sharing his own path to enlightenment. Still, the lack of variety and movement has a soporific effect, necessitating an effort of leaning in from the audience. If you do though, the rewards are abundant, with Saying Yes To Yes offering a strong case for radio adaptation. JAY RICHARDSON Assembly Rooms (Venue 20) JJJ In 1981, the first Delorean sports cars rolled off the production line in Belfast, brainchild of American entrepreneur John Delorean and herald of a bright future in a city blighted by violence and unemployment. Less than two years later, the plant closed and the company was declared bankrupt. Jon Ivay’s new play sets out to tell the complex story of the Delorean dream and how it failed so spectacularly, taking millions of pounds of government subsidy with it.

From the outset, the play feels overly burdened with detail. Trying too hard to be comprehensive, it buries the dramatic potential of the story under the weight of still more events, people and places. A charismatic performance from Cory Peterson as Delorean leads a strong cast of eight, but the staging feels unimaginative – we don’t see a single car, far less the distinctive wing-doored DMC-12, the car of Back to the Future.

Thoroughly researched and carefully dramatised, the play will appeal to anyone with an interest in the story. But some of the most interesting questions – was Delorean a conman, a madman or a visionary? – are unanswered, while potentially fruitful plotlines, such as the British PA who attempted to betray him, remain unexplored. SUSAN MANSFIELD Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33) JJJ Ultimately a bloody mess, this third instalment of depraved sketches from one of the recent torch-bearers of the genre is a significant disappointment. With James Meehan focusing on his solo show, or unable to work with director and ex-partner Kiri Pritchard-mclean, depending on which version of events you choose to believe, performance is left to Kath Hughes and Edward Easton. For supposedly dramatic reasons, the shake-up isn’t explained until the confusing end, making it a nagging distraction throughout, as you’re constantly anticipating Meehan making a belated entrance.

Hughes and Easton are a capable double-act but forced to do more of the heavy lifting, they essentially drop the pretence of ever playing characters, with Hughes becoming especially one-note with her anger management issues.

Plenty of these are directed at Adam Rowley, the Lamda-trained actor they actually have kind of drafted in to replace Meehan, his privilege inciting entertaining, class-based aggression from the chippy northerners. However, Rowley’s relatively restricted time on stage – and the general mishmash of tropes from Gein’s previous shows alongside some fresh, self-abasing horrors – suggests frantic, last minute rewriting, the sense of remaining hands scrambling to the pump practically acknowledged by the crouching, additional presence of Glenn Moore on stage throughout for a single, throwaway joke. JAY RICHARDSON Laughing Horse @ The Mockingbird (Venue 441) J The show is called Andrew Silverwood is a Self Absorbed Twat. Turns out he is. He punctuates his relentlessly self-satisfied hour with exaggerated OMG faces, pulled at the audience, presumably to alert us to the fact that something hilariously outrageous has happened. It hadn’t. KATE COPSTICK