Comedy review: Alfie Brown: Imagination, Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh

On his night, Alfie Brown is a comic of rare intelligence, candour and scabrous wit
Alfie Brown struggles to fulfil  his potential with this year's Fringe showAlfie Brown struggles to fulfil  his potential with this year's Fringe show
Alfie Brown struggles to fulfil his potential with this year's Fringe show

Alfie Brown: Imagination, Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh * * *

But this decidedly was not his night. Waiting on stage as the audience filed in, filling time with some barely interested banter with the front rows, for some reason it threw off his rhythm and the show never got on an even keel.

Given that a large part of it was about being swept up and absorbed into a crowd, he obviously wasn't feeling it in the same way that he recounts his spiritual experience attending an away game of his beloved Liverpool FC. A Scouser by dint of his mother's birth, his southern accent failed to bar him from the community of supporters that embraced him and his brother. And he gloried in their acceptance. Certainly, it was a happier environment for him than Comic Con, to which he took his kids because of his actor girlfriend's role in the Harry Potter universe, and casts a witheringly sceptical eye over.

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Persecuted by his ever-present debt and the difficulties of raising children gender neutral, even as his girlfriend pushes him for another one, Brown self-sabotages Imagination at any point that it starts to get interesting.

Until 25 August

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