★★★

CAN any relationship survive an hour or two of watching Daniel Sloss? The Fife comedian, by his estimations, has racked up dozens of newly-singled audience members, each of them forced into a dramatic reassessment of their love life thanks to his unforgivingly bleak worldview.

For the 26-year-old, there is little shade between sustainable and worthless partnerships: they are, he explained, either a perfect part of the life jigsaw – a pragmatic concept introduced by his father when Sloss was seven – or a case of desperately waiting for the other person to die (“you’re driving? No, stay on the phone.”)

His last maligned relationship was with a vegan – a group he berated for well-chosen reasons – and one of his sources of hatred was alternative medicine, dissected during a reimagining of the horror of Steve Jobs’ doctor when the Apple supremo delayed his cancer treatment.

At times, Sloss’s flow was brilliant, his vitriol vicariously cathartic even when the darkness consuming him was nowhere near as shocking as he assumed. At others, his shakey rambling seemed an inevitable by-product of a brutal schedule and his self-professed fondness for alcohol and drugs. The show's sense of unbalance might reflect its writer’s lack of a sure footing.