Adele Cliff @ Just the Tonic, The Caves

Adele Cliff has a talent for good jokes and also bad jokes of the kind which make you laugh anyway. 

The premise of her full debut hour is that she's a bit of a follower, a people pleaser – a bit of a sheep. She casts herself as being in the shadow of her two little sisters, whose careers and quality of life overtook Cliff's almost as soon as they left university to go straight into jobs and climb the property ladder. More of her life and personality is revealed in her disappointment at not making the netball team or her treatment of friendship bracelets as a binding contract. 

Unfortunately wrapping all this up in a loosely autobiographical show doesn't best deploy Cliff's one-liner abilities. Perhaps it's down to the misunderstanding in Edinburgh that you need a theme or a story, rather than the reality that these are just effective ways to hold an audience's attention for an hour. Cliff has plenty of material and sharpening that into a show of wall to wall gags may have made better use of her comedic style. Although, when she makes darker jokes (one around the implications of the Toy Story universe for a teen's bedroom) it combines with her light family angst on stage into a compelling persona.

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Adele Cliff: Sheep, Just the Tonic at The Caves (Just the Wee One), 2-26 Aug (not 13), 4:10pm, £5/PWYW

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