Deborah Frances-White: Half a Can of Worms

Absorbing and affecting, delivered with candour, humour and self-awareness, this emotional show traces a compelling search for identity. Australian comic Deborah Frances-White always knew that she was adopted and grew up in a loving household. But when she belatedly sought to trace her birth parents, through the scant information afforded her by the clinical but efficient Australian system, the internet, and wild speculation, not to mention a couple of cut-price private eyes, she came to realise that you can't open Half A Can of Worms – it's all or nothing, and you'd better steel yourself for what you may or may not find.

Rather than simply outline her experience, Frances-White capably conveys the inner turmoil that she wrestled with at every stage of the process, excitedly pursuing false leads and rounding out her tale with eccentric, peripheral characters for light relief. It's a dramatic detective story with escalating stakes. There's also a strong line of enquiry on the roles nature and nurture play in our development, with Frances-White devoting plenty of time musing on the machinations of fate.

Whether the show has to be 75 minutes long is debatable. It certainly retains your interest for that time, but there's a sense of the comic revelling in her new situation once a certain point is reached, even if it's understandable in the circumstances. Liable to bring a tear to your eye, she nevertheless elicits plenty of laughs from the absurdities of her journey. Intriguingly, too, it ends with the promise of further developments to come.