High Ape: The Napi Lewis Show

Eh? A tiny and baffled audience giggle nervously all the way through Napi Lewis's show tonight, never entirely sure if they're laughing at him or with him, as he barrels through mimes and sketches that refuse to make a lick of sense. Some are utterly incomprehensible. Some contain flashes of Keaton-esque genius. One lasts for five minutes and is in a foreign language (he's Italian, but it might have been Hebrew, or simply Gibberish).

Lewis does have a strong presence that holds his audience in slight terror as he dances with balloons, smashes kiwi fruit and plays the accordion. A volunteer is dragged up at the end and forced to hold a small piece of rope. Like everything else in the show, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason for this. It's slightly frustrating, as you feel all of these sketches may make sense in his head, but the inside of his brain seems inaccessible without some pharmaceutical-grade hallucinogens.

We've not given this any kind of star rating as such, not being sure that it's in any way directly comparable to the other Fringe acts who make sense and speak identifiable languages. But it's free and it's worth dropping in for that dose of WTF?-ness which is a vital part of any Fringe experience.