Dandy Darkly's Myth Mouth

The nicest thing you could say about Dandy Darkly is that he is a true Vaudevillian, in the sense that his act comes round each year with comforting familiarity. This is his fourth Edinburgh season and apart from the fact he now delivers his quirky high-pitched alliterative monlogues in a silvery fish-scale printed onesie looking like he'd just been landed by a Peterhead trawler, not much has changed.

Darkly's creator and alter ego Neil Arthur James hails from Cedartown, Georgia and brings with his character both the looping vowel sounds of the antebellum South, as strangled by Bette Davis in The Cabin in the Cotton, its traditions of storytelling and a hint of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil superstition.

It's not especially good or clever, but it is different and Edinburgh relishes difference: so the audience respond well to a reworked classical tale of a junkie Persephone who gets "slut-shamed by the Real Housewives of Olympus" and the lazily-scripted notion that Zeus wore a soiled jock strap and a gimp mask. Then again, they gurgle at any reference to drugs, of which there are many. The best of the stories is one which comes closest to surreal originality by following the brief space career of Russian canine, cosmonaut Leica, imagining her encounter with the over-literal cats who control Mars and try to solve the cold war with hot chocolate and blankets.

His shows are technically tight and, timed to a sound effects iPhone track, impressively done.