Shane Langan: Not Also But Only

If bad writing is an art, Shane Langan is well on his way to mastering it. An intense literary reading in the cramped Gilded Balloon Turret could only be a recipe for awkwardness – a dynamic that Langan sets out to exploit by means of calculatedly terrible forays into short stories, confessional poetry, and a cheerleading trade magazine for the dairy industry. With his scruffy tie and thick-rimmed glasses, Langan’s aspiring writer looks every inch a 21st-century Adrian Mole, and his opening reading (from a romantic/action/political/spy novel entitled Tainted Milk?) wins over a young audience with an affectionate pastiche of overenthusiastic schoolboy fiction.

The gentle, endearingly cheeky tone is sustained throughout. A delightfully silly diary entry bemoaning a bullying pet (“My cat shat on the mat in my flat; my cat, my cat’s a twat!”) is followed by the highlight of the show: the poignant tale of a lonely soul who wakes up every night to find Count Dracula sitting on his lavatory and waiting for a manly chat.

When comedy gets that surreal, there’s no way of telling whether it’ll work. Langan may end up having second thoughts about a second short story, about a little girl who skins a dead squirrel and attaches it to a robot, which is plain confusing. And while his satirical digs consistently raise a laugh, the targets can seem obvious: the excerpt from the memoirs of a puddle-deep TV personality chases some well-worn lines of attack. He’s nailed the gawky charm needed to pull his concept off; all that’s needed is a few more truly terrible ideas.