Trygve Wakenshaw on Trygve vs a Baby

"What I'm making is a duo show," says Trygve Wakenshaw. "I've been doing solo shows and now I'm onto working with other people."

So far, so normal. But, what Wakenshaw has left a little understated here is just who he is sharing a stage with. His boy, Phineas, is to make his Fringe debut alongside his dad, at just 13 months old.

Wakenshaw senior's shows are responsible for putting mime back on the comedy map, the most recent of which – Kraken and Nautilus – receiving award nominations in Melbourne and Edinburgh respectively. Kraken perhaps owed something to his Gaulier clown training, and was quite freewheelin', while Nautilus was a more structured story. It is due to his range that people have joked that he could make any kind of show work, even one with a baby in it. And so it was natural for Wakenshaw to think: "Why not? Let's start him in the family business.

"Nautilus became this really solid piece of theatre. I know it inside and out. This show is really taking it back to the early days of when I was doing Kraken, and I was trying to respond between what was happening with the audience and onstage. It is the most terrified I've been about a show for a while."

Of course, they are by no-means the first father and son comedy team, although Phineas has a huge head start even on Buster Keaton, the legendary US comedian who starred alongside his dad from the age of three. The Keatons regularly worried audiences with the realism of their knockabout routines, leaving many fearing young Buster was injured. Wakenshaw isn't planning that kind of show, but is he concerned the very presence of a baby might make an audience too tense for comedy?

"In my naïvity I still can't see how it might make some people cross, and I'm trying to protect myself from that. Someone I don't know wrote something on Facebook thinking it was using a child for cheap laughs, adding a sad or angry faced emoji. This is someone who hasn't seen the show and doesn't know my work. But, I am nervous about that because it is not my style to mess with the audience in an aggressive or bad way – I want the audience to be having as nice a time as I am."

This is especially true as the show promises a charm deriving from play. "A lot of the show is me enjoying playing with him. It's me asking, 'Can we have as much fun on the stage as we do crawling around in the living room at home?'" And Wakenshaw has been encouraged from the response of people who have seen the pair working on their routines, remarking it is "beautiful to watch a parent and child." And it is part of that innocence that he wishes to capture. 

His father may excel in silent comedy, but Phineas has been anything but a silent partner when it comes to writing the show. "While we've been rehearsing, he's been walking a lot more and talking. He really loves playing the xylophone, so I think, 'This is great, they'll be a musical section of the show.'"

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Trygve vs a Baby, Assembly Roxy (Central), 3-27 Aug (not 14 & 21), 3pm, £10-£12.50