Show Rating:

Kim Hope has a phenomenal stage charisma: she's dynamic, charming, enthusiastic, animated and so powerfully upbeat that it's impossible not to be transfixed. An hour in her effortless good company simply zings by.

Only problem is, she applies all this alluring performance to the most workaday material, getting by on her personable appeal but only rarely hitting good gags.

One of the best comes when she confesses she's superficial ­ but unfortunately it's true, and this breezy hour never delves much below the surfave. Interesting, deeper areas do arise, but Hope tiptoes too gently around them.

The theme of the show is that in the words of a great philosopher 'life is a rollercoaster' full of ups and downs. Ronan Keating, it was. Hope has a crude swingometer to indicate her moods throughout the anecdotes she recalls, but this pointless prop is pretty much her only contrivance.

She wafts through fairly generic discussions about getting drunk, having hangovers and waking up next to someone shocking; how the miserable British climate compares to her native Australia; and the finer points of dating, with help from the book What Men Want. While it's jolly, she's not telling us anything we didn't know already.

But then there are a couple of moments when she'll say something that stops the listener dead: about the time she slipped into the black fog of depression, or when she found out that the man she had been seeing had a secret, pervertedly criminal, life, especially. These are things we want to find out more about.

Hope puts so much into getting us to like and empathise with her that we so want to hear how she got on, what unfolded, what she felt like. Instead, she makes a gag or two then skips gaily onto the next topic, selling the audience short.

You can't but admire her energy, her forceful but engaging personality or the way she skilfully acts out all the scenarios she describes (always exaggeratedly OTT, but never seeming forced or overly actorly). But with mostly ordinary material, we're only getting half the package.

Steve Bennett