Eric Lampaert looks weird, he really does. Having seen him a year ago, and with some pretty odd-looking people gracing the Fringe in general, I had forgotten quite what a visual experience he is. Even at first sight, he can seem deceptively normal. After an hour, however, his bony fingers and enormous teeth start to creep right under your skin.For a performer, this is a gift. A gift, however, which Lampaert perhaps squanders. It seems to make up too great a percentage of his entertainment value, although, to be fair, he has made more of it in the past. The part which he has control over, the actual comedy, simply doesn’t measure up.Not that he is a bad comic. Lampaert’s show is very well structured, and full of little recalls, and he manages to keep it admirably under-control; he can go off on a long, fascinating tangent which seems to be the new direction of the show, and bring it right back with a bump to whichever point he launched off from. He brings a wild, seemingly directionless energy to his performance, and is constantly interrupting himself with new ideas and characters which one hopes are genuinely accidental.This habit of interrupting himself is symptomatic, however, of the problems with his show. The, no doubt, deliberately loose and frenetic delivery, punctuated by chuckles and asides, while technically skillful is also rather difficult to listen to. It also takes the weight out of many of his jokes which, cleverly conceived, could be much funnier with a cleaner delivery. Some of the material which he used on the festival circuit last year makes a reappearance, but broken up as it is now, somehow does not seem to work as well.All this aside, it is an entertaining hour and is not a bad use for some spare time in the early evening.
