Regret Me Not

Fringe newcomer Andrea Donovan has a long way to go. This one-woman character comedy flounders in unchallenging territory, peddling out tentatively risqué quirkiness. The show’s lack of comic substance means precious few laughs smothered by incidental detail, and it's as though she's more concerned with sculpting setting within a sketch than with entertaining her audience.

The desperation of each of Donovan's six personas could seem to account for their feeble humour – but the apparent lack of knowing with which mother-in-law jokes and penis gags are delivered means that it’s near-impossible to appreciate them on any higher level. What’s more, her anti-heroines are distinctly stale – take Kathleen, a forgery of the patronising, callous life coach exhausted years ago by Little Britain and The League of Gentlemen.

Donovan, 30, is obviously an accomplished performer; her spark could easily flourish with better scripts. As she darts between shrill, giddy toff and motherly Geordie, her accent rarely slips, though elsewhere a wrong turn leaves her drawling away somewhere between New York and Johannesburg. Whether she’s yelping naughty words like ‘fanny’ until the audience surrenders a titter or smugly naming a character Yoni, Donovan fails to realise that even the crudest joke requires thought. For her, it seems, the summit of naughty humour is a tale of a fling with a hermaphrodite. Meanwhile, characters like dreary, Brummie Audrey are clear attempts at embarrassingly familiar caricature – but here the audience is left cringing for all the wrong reasons.