Audience participation in clowning is always a dice roll. Will the crowd get involved with your hour of slapstick cocaine jokes, absurdist observations on banking, and writhing crescendos of sexual frenzy? Will they shout out answers often enough to maintain the show’s momentum? Or will they be a bit tired on a Thursday evening and leave more awkward gaps of silence than an ill-advised Tinder date?

The latter proved to be true during this performance of The Poor Rich (named after the pre-Code financial satire film from 1934), but it hardly seemed like the act’s fault. Consummate clown Gemma Soldati made a valiant attempt to gee the clutch of people in Assembly Roxy’s basement into raucous participation, and her forceful persona as a sexually dominant, coked-up financier is an at-times hilarious grotesque with patches of well-thought-out brilliance.

At its heart, this is an intelligent clown show loaded with gross-out humour, a brusque attitude to sex and debauchery, and a grab-bag of hit-and-miss sketches that showcase the sheer insanity of capitalism. When Soldati does manage to coax audience members into life, she mines hilarious answers from them, and turns the few who are game into entertaining allies. Topping all of this is a stomach-churning visual gag on consumerism that could go toe-to-toe with Divine’s infamous turd-eating sequence any day. There’s a lot to love in Soldati’s one-woman circus of horrible happenings but, like many shows of this ilk, it lives or dies by those in on the night.

The Poor Rich, Assembly Roxy, until 27 August, 10pm.