Tim Key – review

I never expected Tim Key to remind me of La Clique. That circus show's signature image was ropes act David O'Mer swooping sexily in and out of a bath, spurting water over the crowd. And now here comes Key, whose new show takes place around, and in, a tub full of soapy water centre-stage. I can't promise acrobatics, but there's not much else you can rule out with Key, whose gadfly hour features bathetic verse and Russian song, films, standup subversion and play.

I found the show more seductive than his 2009 Comedy award-winning effort, perhaps because the balance tilts slightly away from Key's trademark poetry. There's also a sequence in which Key deviously addresses the criticism that his lyric miniatures are underwritten, by sharing with us infinite redrafts of the same tiny poem.

In addition, there's a conventional anecdote that slips into surrealism, a chapter-and-verse rebuttal of the shopkeeper who thinks he knows why Key is buying pornographic playing cards, and a one-word-at-a-time storytelling game that outsources the comedy hilariously to Key's audience. There are also – as per the previous show – lushly shot film sequences that deal less in humour than plangent oddity.

You could say the same of Key in general, who is forever up-ending expectations. There's something marvellously sly about the way he assumes consensus around his off-kilter take on the world. Music underscores the show; Key's delivery is fluting and calm: the result is like a practical joke in relaxation-tape form. At times it's like a windup; elsewhere, it's so lovely you could bathe in it.