As dark a show as any that Alice Cockayne has brought to the Fringe before, this warped, goofily clownish hour opens arrestingly with the comic playing the absurdly bosomy proprietor of a strip club, her girls as psychologically compromised as they are seductive, the house speciality a kinky bathe in an unlikely substance. With inventive use of props and costumes, the character comic making as blithely surreal a spectacle of herself as ever, it was a pity that on this night, her intermittently malfunctioning cheek mic rendered snatches of monologues unintelligible, an early blow from which the show never properly recovered.

Simmeringly vamping it up as an oedipally-worrying matriarch and a nail-salon technician with a cod East European accent clacking away with ridiculously extended talons, Cockayne’s women of indeterminate vintage but blowsily confident experience have an outré, mythical quality, even as we find them in familiar workplaces. The exception is a softly spoken, contained cleaner, efficiently wiping away, just cheerily actualised in her occupation and delighted to be there. With limited yet deft, persuasive audience interaction, Cockayne fully brings you into her otherwise slightly intimidating arena, her avowedly neurodiverse oddness informing her performance’s big and inexplicably funny moments.

Alice Cockayne: Licensed Professional Trained Qualified, Pleasance Courtyard, until 24 August, 10.40pm; main picture: Katie Price.