Mike Wozniak: Take the Hit @ The Lowry, Salford, 19 Jan

Balancing on the age-old comedy trope of ‘take my mother-in-law’, Mike Wozniak’s Take the Hit is borne of his wife’s parents moving in with him and his family for the foreseeable future. With this classic comedy scenario in mind Wozniak dresses his set with sequins and himself in tuxedo and bow tie to fit in with the show business he purports to present. Of course, in an obvious twist, the show business never arrives and Wozniak instead airs his grievances with his overbearing space-invading in-laws.

It's a nice conceit let down by Wozniak’s failure to commit fully to the idea that he is here to do a show that got sidetracked because his home life is a nightmare with more generations than bedrooms in his current abode; he is just happy to be out of the house.

Wozniak is a great crafter of a story, a very good physical comedian (his use of the mic stand to simulate his mother-in-law’s pecking and a traffic cop on a horse are terrific) and has a wonderful, sometimes whimsical, grasp of the English language, but he fails to grab the audience and take them with him on his journey. Wozniak actually makes light of his failure to find a common ground with the audience, but this only shines a light on what precisely the problem is and keeps this good show from being a great show. A bumbling raconteur with a very English style, he is never able to flow, only finding sharp ends and abrupt junctions, which means the audience is never truly swept away by his stop-start routine.

A great performer with an interesting style, he is trapped between abandoning the basis of the show and simply getting on with his act: he neither fully commits to a show business parody nor to being a man in the middle of a breakdown who forgot to write a show because his mother-in-law permeates his every thought. There is rumblings of great comedy here, but the show as a whole lacks direction.