I must start this review with an odd thank you, due to this venue only having a tiny and (respectfully) quiet bar we were forced to find another nearby. We stumbled in to ‘The Nightcap’, a basement bar located almost directly under Stand 2 which plays great music and whose bar staff absolutely know their way around a cocktail. This became our Fringe go-to bar and our stay was greatly improved because of it.

Thank you’s dealt with, lets get back to the clowns – ‘Satanic rites’ is less of a traditional stand-up show and more of an opportunity to sit with Robin as he rummages through a great many piles of books, movies and music that he, quite possibly, has just found in his loft.

Now that may sound like quite a dull way to spend an hour but if you can recall the feeling of finding a random box somewhere in your home and opening it to discover long forgotten but much-loved items from your childhood then you may begin to get an idea of just how engrossing this show was.

There was a plan for this show, I’m sure there was… there must have been. But it quickly goes out of the window as Robin waxes lyrical about the type of B-movie horror literature that he adored as a child. In fact, this may be the only teenager in history to discover crabs and be thrilled about it! Yes, the classic literary works of author Guy N Smith, including Night of the Crabs, Crab’s Moon & Crabs: The Human sacrifice, feature prominently within this trip down memory lane.

Horror is not really my genre, but you can’t help but get swept away by the boundless enthusiasm that this clown has for it. Tales of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are both charming and revealing in equal measure and the classic safety film shorts are used to great effect… but really this is all about Robin.

It is difficult to accurately describe the frenetic nature and pace of this performance – I imagine that it would be similar to giving a 5-year-old a bag of Haribo and 2 cans of Redbull to wash them down with and then asking them to take you through the favourite things in their bedroom.

This is the kind of show where no two audiences will get the same experience. My suggestion would be to just sit back, relax, don’t think to hard about what is going on and just enjoy an incredibly engaging clown take you through all of the things that make him smile.

In purists terms it’s not the greatest Robin Ince show that I have ever seen but it is certainly a lot of fun and well worth the price of entry.

Clown Stars: * * * *

@The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh

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