Review: Dalia Malek: Another Castle

Taking her show title from a feature of Super Mario Bros, whereby any time you think you've reached your goal, you're fobbed off to another castle, satisfaction always just out of reach, Dalia Malek is a gamer and malcontent, who's nevertheless adroit at finding the funny in gently bucking convention.

Born in Texas to Egyptian immigrant parents and raised Christian in Southern California, she's got plenty of acquired guilt and relative privilege, at least in relation to her parents' experience. But she's struggled to find work and a romantic partner, a viral hit she contrived out of an exchange she had on a dating app becoming the means by which her mother learned of her sexuality.

There's a really endearing quality to her somewhat unconventional relationship now though, with her pansexual boyfriend fully signed up to her wish to never have kids. Malek's ruminations on remaining childless are by turns shallow, deep and seldom expressed elsewhere, but wickedly dark and waggish. With a PhD in human rights, she briefly affects superiority but it's rare that Malek allows herself too long without an undercut of lacerating self-mockery. An observation about suicide in Edinburgh is critically under-researched. But on her own experience, she's dryly witty and goes some way to rescuing the reputation of gamer nerds from humourlessness.