Sean Hughes: Penguins

Gilded Balloon Teviot Wine Bar

Until Aug 25

Five stars

Twenty-three years have passed since Sean Hughes won the Perrier Award, launching him into an up-and-down life that took in TV fame, a side career as a novelist and a wilderness period when it all seemed to go horribly wrong.

There are clear echoes of that award-winning show in Hughes's 2013 Edinburgh return; the bright-eyed boy of 1990 may well have become the seasoned 47-year-old before us, but his search for "the one" to share his life still has an aching sense of romantic tragedy about it, and it's impossible not to be moved even as we laugh at and with him: hence the tender sigh that rose from the audience when a tale of frustrated school infatuation ended by Hughes simply putting two kids' coats on the same wooden peg.

It's theatrical moments like this that raise Hughes above his peers - this, and the almost Beckett-like insight he pours into a show that has depth as well as surface humour. Over the years he has crafted philosophy and art from life's little failures, and Penguins is him at his funniest and most profound. Sean Hughes is back in the building.