Review: Marcus Brigstocke, Nottingham Playhouse

What is the nature of God? Philosophers and clerics have puzzled over that for centuries when, as it turns out, they could have just asked Marcus Brigstocke.

The Lord's a bit like Birmingham, he explained. Many roads run to It, but whether you're travelling the M5 of Christianity, the M40 of Islam or the M6 of Judaism, you're going to the same destination.

"And I'm not questioning the existence of Birmingham, by the way," he added.

Brigstocke describes himself as an atheist who'd like to believe in God, and the Edinburgh-tested God Collar show he brought to the Playhouse dumped that often messy can of worms right on the table with cutting but genuinely good-natured intelligence.

This could have all descended fairly rapidly into preaching to the atheist choir - a pastiche of mean jokes at the expense of the religious. Brigstocke made it something more, partially by playing no favourites. The Pope took some hits, but Richard Dawkins and smug liberal atheism took more. Daily Mail readers were sometimes on the receiving end, but so were Guardian readers.

The first act contained more water-cooler one-liners, a few of which played close to the bone.

"The Pope paid a visit to Poland last year," Brigstocke said. "Something he'd wanted to do as a younger man."

Then there was his plan create an image of Mohammed in the picture-hidden-in-picture Magic Eye form, "so that only patient Muslims will want to kill me."

Having in the first act laid out his credentials as someone who doesn't have much time for religion and doesn't really think this God chap exists, Brigstocke used the second act to explore the possible benefits of faith. Of why it might be nice if He did exist. He talked about his two young children. About his late grandfather and dying grandmother. About a friend who died several years ago.

And whenever it started to sound a bit less like comedy and more like a 30-something man trying to make sense of the world, he'd bring the room back with a story about the late friend's propensity for exposing himself, or his grandmother's apparently massive breasts.

It ended where so many pub conversations about faith end -with a youngish bloke who doesn't really believe and who positively loathes organised religion, but who can't quite write off what's positive about faith.

But this was no pub conversation; it was an equal parts caustic and big-hearted narrative from one of Britain's best comics.

Preach on, Brother Brigstocke.

By ERIK PETERSEN