Riverside Studios, W6

Like most good comedians, Ed Byrne is an angry man. Rappers who spend their time rapping about how good they are at rapping? Oh, that rankles. Parents who use their offspring as a conversational nuke to win arguments? That really ticks him off. Jade Goody? Christian homophobes? People who think wearing wristbands will solve the world’s ills? Please, don’t get him started.

In fact, the only real problem with Standing Up and Falling Down — the show that made this long-haired Irish comic the biggest-selling stand-up at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe — is that he doesn’t get started soon enough.

He establishes his premise — that he’s reprising the righteous rage of Michael Douglas’s humbug-hating antihero D-Fens from the film Falling Down. But then he also reprises some gags that were cut from his TV appearances — who knew that Blankety Blank was such a hotbed of repression? — before turning into a cul-de-sac about ticket touts and hating the other punters at a Pearl Jam gig. Half an hour in and this angry young man seems less Jimmy Porter, more Charles Pooter.

After a meandering opening, though, his aggro gets more accessible. The show grows stronger and sharper as its 90 minutes progress. Byrne often gets labelled an observational comic — which is to say that he nails the inconsistencies that the rest of us notice but stop short of identifying. Which is to say that he’s good enough at his job that you don’t see the cogs turning.

So when on song he makes his concerns our concerns, whether or not we have the same attitude to the horrors of parochial porn or the indignity of giving up booze for a month — “I don’t need to drink,” he says, “I just need to drink to enjoy myself.” Impatient though this 34-year-old may be with the rest of the world, he’ll always include himself in his satirical sights.

So it’s a shame that this slick, inventive show doesn’t quite catch fire. The Falling Down device isn’t followed through — this is just Byrne venting spleen on whatever takes his fancy, D-Fens be damned. And, given the quality of so much of this material, not to mention his confident audience interaction, he should be able to sustain the show’s energy better to build laughs on laughs.

But his dissection of the difficulty of sustaining romance, Stand-Up 101 though it might seem, is delivered with a freshness that belies the months Byrne has been on tour with this show. Half an hour shorter and this show might really sizzle. Even so, Byrne is bright and quick and thoroughly entertaining.

Box office: 020-8237 1111

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