Dan Atkinson - The Credit Crunch and Other Biscuits

Bounding onstage following a characteristically cynical short film introduction – documenting his own passage to manhood through the greed of the eighties and the moral vacuity of the nineties – Atkinson exhibits the sort of autistic mania normally associated with comics compensating for a dearth of talent. Happily, Atkinson does not correlate with this trend. He's a sort of Daniel Kitson-on-amphetamines character: brutally self-deprecating but infectiously confident. He invests his sixty minutes with a robust energy that maintains his infamously shabby aesthetic and keeps the audience attentive and occasionally breathless.

Tonight's set stalls at points. The eponymous credit crunch drifts in and out of the material arbitrarily rather than providing a binding narrative to keep the show focused. As a result, many of the big punchlines are greeted with an understated giggle rather than the big pay-off evidently expected by Atkinson. In the credit crunch and its accompanying media hysteria lies a rich seam of comedy to be sure, but its inclusion here feels more like an attempt to crowbar topicality into an otherwise aimless performance.

But Atkinson is a likeable character and as such the audience warm to his quirks as the set progresses. His improvisational material scores highly, and his well-judged vitriol on the swaggering retards that populate St. Andrew's University betray a comedic nous that will serve him well in the future. He's a talented comedian who will no doubt reach greater heights, and quite possibly acclaim, as the festival rolls on.