Sean Hughes: Life Becomes Noises – Edinburgh review

Sean Hughes begins with a joke about the audience's horror that he'll be discussing his dad's death for the next hour. Far from it: comedy shows about dads, dead and sometimes alive, are a thriving sub-genre in Edinburgh (witness Mark Thomas's show at the Traverse, Bravo Figaro!), and if anything audiences seem hungry for meaningful subjects addressed through humour. The most striking characteristic of Hughes's approach is its near-total lack of sentimentality, which runs so contrary to current orthodoxy as to begin to seem weird. I've seen Hughes perform on several occasions, and don't remember him ever being so jaunty.

Narratively, the show skips from Hughes Jr's vigil at his dying father's bedside, to scenes of growing up under this sozzled patriarch ("When my father came home drunk – or as we used to call it, night-time … "). Bedbound, Dad is dosed with morphine, his confused perceptions brought to life here by Hughes with animal handpuppets. There are flashes of Hughes's fury at the indignities inflicted in the name of an impossible cure. But usually he keeps things light, with running gags about his mum's smoking, and a routine about the extraordinary potency of cheap music – it's not Dad dying that makes Hughes cry, it's Snow Patrol.

The good cheer occasionally feels superficial – although there's a payoff later, and I admire Hughes's cussed refusal to emote. He has incorporated old material about his childhood into this set, which sits comfortably enough. But it's stronger when focused tightly on his dad, and on Hughes's experience of the odd rituals surrounding death. On needing planning permission for a headstone: "If we're going to go the whole hog, we might as well put in for a conservatory." There aren't great insights here, nor does Hughes milk the major drama of family bereavement. But his show is a modest gem, marvelling at and accepting not the exceptionalism of death, but its normality.