Based on a story by Gogol, this show is clever without being intelligent Kevin McAleer
Chalk and Cheese

It takes about ten seconds to work out that Kevin McAleer is not going to deliver a normal stand-up routine and about ten minutes to wish that he would. A nondescript, grey-haired Irishman in a green shirt and scuffed shoes, he shuffles on to an empty stage - in this case the Soho Theatre's - his eyes darting from side to side. "I can't say much," he begins. "They're on to me." But he says an awful lot, and gags that would entertain over ten minutes become repetitive over an hour. Most speak to the same joke: the McAleer character's paranoia. As you don't believe in it for a moment, it makes for character comedy of a peculiarly dead-end sort.

The reason you know from the off that this is not any old stand-up is because McAleer refuses to engage with his audience. He is a modern-day Ancient Mariner and we are the buttonholed wedding guest. We are not expected to join in, let alone heckle, and when a woman walked out the night that I was in, McAleer did not berate her, but noted aloud that she would be off to get the tormentors who were on to him and he had less time left than he thought.

Solipsism is an interesting thing, but it makes for theatre, not stand-up. We are deprived of the danger and spontaneity that live comedy promises. Ross Noble's act, for example, is structured around fantasies, but he incorporates into these what the audience throws him. Here you have to take the dish as it has been cooked.

Some in the audience the other night were more than happy to do so. A man to my left was literally slapping his thighs in merriment. Chalk and Cheese will appeal to those who love wordplay. The second hand on a clock, McAleer points out, is a lie: it is its third hand. If there is a dish of the day, what were the also-rans? (Otherwise, "of the day" is a hollow title.) "Dolphin-friendly" is an odd thing to say of a fickle fish like a tuna. The great Irish famine of 1845 was a terrible time - quarter to seven, when everyone is looking forward to their tea.

Some of these one-liners really sing. I envied his reference to his three beautiful children "and two ugly ones". What really got the half of the audience that was into him going, however, was two absurdist fantasies - a long conceit about lambs in fish tanks, and another about meringue. This is the humour of young men free-associating over the Guinness.

But back to the plot, for we are listening, you see, to a short story. He is on the run from "them": the postmen who know where he lives, the other person on the phone "who knows you're waiting", the lying manufacturers who claim they do not make your cereal for anyone else, the park authorities who produce signs that pronounce with confidence "You Are Here" (how do they know?). Even the water is tapped, he says, which, judging by the groan it got, is a pun that could go.

There are moments when it looks as if this ever-heightening paranoia is going to build to something terrible. He begins to see his Pin number in other drivers' number plates, mistakes an air hostess for a terrorist and, in an attempt to thwart the postmen ("they work for the government"), burns down his own house. At this point, surely, his three beautiful and two ugly children should be taken into care and McAleer sectioned. The monologue should zoom back to make us realise he is talking from within a padded cell. This, after all, is the promise of his press material, which insists that his show is based on Gogol's "Diary of a Madman".

It is a misleading comparison. Gogol's hero is arrested but comes to believe that his interrogations and tortures are inductions to becoming the king of Spain. There is no deluded grandeur in McAleer's trajectory, even if, for a second, he claims to be called Jesus. Nor does this madman, unlike Gogol's, possess insights into a corrupt bureaucracy. None of his complaints that he is being watched has any foundation; I guess if they did, he would not think them funny. So while we learn more than we need to about this man's mental state, we learn nothing about anything else. McAleer's show is clever without being intelligent.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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