★★☆☆☆
Deadpan is good, listless is bad. And in this tentative first British appearance by the thirtysomething American comic Aparna Nancherla, her dry remarks about her life in New York too rarely raise either her audience’s heartbeat or her own. “Take your time with these,” she says as one tossed-away quip belatedly detonates. Yet if you’re plying the sort of introverted approach that asks your audience to come to you, you need sharper material than Nancherla has to offer here. Her observations about her anxiety and her forays online may be hewn from real experience, but they still end up feeling generic.
As she explores the awfulness of being cat-called, or comparing oneself to models, or makes a whimsical remark about pilots, this is like being cornered at a party by someone who has a neat point to make, but then continues to grind that point into the ground. She needs more flourishes of imagination to avoid her descriptions of the torpor of working at home becoming torpid themselves. Talking about going on bad dates, here and there she crafts the sort of perfectly formed line that suggests real writing talent, but too often you’re left craving something you haven’t heard before.
And since she doesn’t interact much with the crowd — save for an eggy exchange with a heckler— you’re glad when she brings out her laptop for an illustrated lecture on emojis, texting and a wry look at silly café and bar reviews people have left on Yelp. It’s thin stuff, to be honest, but at least it gives her something to play against. She’s not without wit and intelligence, but if she’s going to sustain an hour of stand-up she needs to zero in much more directly on what really matters to her. Wry observations about going online are two-a-penny.
Box office: 020 7478 0100, to June 10