Reviewed: Maeve Higgins at Andrew's Lane Theatre

Maeve Higgins, Andrew's Lane Theatre

Following a successful run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Irish comedian Maeve Higgins returned to Dublin to open the Bulmers International Comedy Festival. In her "Ha Ha Yum!" show, Higgins is joined by her sister, Lilly, and the two fuse the blindingly obvious connections between cookery and comedy as the latter sets about baking cakes (which are distributed to the audience at the end of the show) and the former sets about the gags. The idea for the show, Higgins explains, is to hark back to the 1950s, "when women made cakes and pretended to be happy". There's only a bit of the retro feel to her material, though, as she gives a delightfully meandering account of her upbringing in Cobh along with contemporary tales of urban life.

She deftly flits from mentions of footballer Peter Crouch to the Irish famine to Rolex-wearing plumbers. And she is perhaps the only comic out there who can squeeze some good material out of the role of the chimney sweep. If it sounds very disjointed, it's not. Higgins has a fantastic stage persona - part ingenue, part knowing - and she uses this to great effect. Sometimes, she's the ditzy innocent with accompanying amounts of self-deprecation; other times she's bringing a real edge to her humour with some scabrous remarks. Perhaps best known for her role in RTÉ's Naked Camera, here Higgins proves that she has a developed comedic voice and that there are plenty of shades to her material.

You may be wondering what the cakes have to do with it - nothing at all is the answer - but that's not important because the set-up turned out to be a great idea.

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