Review by Steve Bennett

If it's a ruse to help fill his donations bucket, it's very effective. Sean McLoughlin speaks in darkly evocative detail about his life of grinding poverty. His diet is as nutritionally rich as sawdust as he ekes out a meagre existence on a shoestring. He's the Albert Steptoe of stand-up... but not so seedy.

Yet as the rag-and-bone man taught us, from such abject misery great comedy can come – and the string-thin McLoughlin finds distinctively dark jokes in his situation. Not that there's anything depressing about his act: he delivers biting lines with a real verve, fired by his despair at how impoverished his life has become as a struggling artist.

On stage he channels an nervous energy into confidence, but that, he says, is the only place he finds it. In the real world he admits to a mass of near-crippling social neuroses. But he leaves that backstage - or at least behind the snail-stained curtain that marks out the room he’s been dealt, a suitably down-at-heel free festival venue.

He has strong material, too, about his romantic life, shocked to find himself in a relationship with his ex-agent. He lays on the ‘I’m not worthy of her’ shtick a bit heavily, but sounds earnest and honest, even confessing to a medical condition that made sex uncomfortable.

Away from his pitiful existence, McLoughlin is less distinctive, but entertaining nonetheless. Half-American, his stories about his visits to family in the less sophisticated parts of the states don't stand out in the same way the great material about his current situation do.

Though he jokes about there being no theme, there is a subtle undercurrent about his coming to learn that he can't rely in single external stimulus to change his life, he has to do it himself. Not that he seems to have acquired much conviction in his own abilities as a comedian, assessing himself in typically downbeat style as having 'no potential'.

That may fit the miserable self-portrait of his persona but I beg to differ. Arenas and global domination may not be his future – he’s too peculiar a flavour for that, even though his a fairly traditional stand-up style. But his solo debut marks him out as an interesting and skillful comic, with some routines of brilliance. He might not yet be able to eat out on his abilities, but he should at least be able to eat.

Review date: 15 Aug 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett