Ventriloquism is by no means at the cutting edge of comedy – and scarcely known to sell out large venues – but in Nina Conti, an exception may be found to rival more famous conventional comics. 

“The masks have been around since the 50s – she’s just the first person stupid enough to improvise with them,” quipped her coarse puppet monkey at one point – a neat reminder that we were indeed watching something no one else has done; making ventriloquist dummies of members of the audience called up onto the stage.

Much of the show revolved around Conti going, as the title of the show suggests, ‘in your face’ – placing masks over willing (or in some cases ostensibly less than willing) volunteers which she could operate by squeezing a small hand pump to make their new ‘lips’ move in time with her speech. However, these masks only covered the lower half of the face, leaving the mixture of mirth and horror in the volunteer/victim’s eyes entertainingly exposed. This was perhaps at its most successful when the person’s body language was visibly at odds with Conti’s words.

“Do you think your wife would like to come up and join you on stage?”

“She sure would!” local Sixth Form assessor and crowd favourite Martin blurted in his newly-acquired American accent as he shook his head – vigorously waving his hand across his throat.

Similar reluctance met Conti’s suggestion that the five audience members on stage, whom she had been simultaneously ventriloquising, in no mean feat, might like to perform a group dance. Yet, throughout the night volunteer after volunteer – and with them, the crowd as a whole – was won over to Conti’s weird world.

Hers is a unique brand of comedy which seems to be attracting increasing attention. From humble beginnings with minor TV roles at the turn of the century, she took her first solo show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007 and has since made her way onto major programmes such as QI, Live at the Apollo, and Channel 4’s 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown. Her latest tour has taken her from the West End in March to New York in December, with stops across the country in the interim; clearly, she is a comedian much in demand and it’s not hard to see why.

However, being improvised, the quality was variable. Where her subjects gave her less to work with – neither quite enthusiastic nor resistant enough – the show did begin to drag a tad; her advice to them that they could “do no wrong” did not always seem to hold true. Nevertheless, on the whole, she did a fine job of judging when extra variety was needed to give the performance a lift.

“I’ll cut the shit and get the monkey out,” she playfully exclaimed at one point, bringing on that variety in the form of her foul-mouthed puppet, ‘Monk’. Having the monkey hypnotise her to sleep and subsequently lose its voice, ventriloquising from inside a body bag on which the money perched and chatted alone with the audience, and – in a clever finale – ‘becoming’ the monkey herself were all tricks done with a real finesse.

Nevertheless, one could not help but feel that the monkey was to some extent the padding; more consistent than the mask segments but less original, and relying a little too heavily on simple profanity on the odd occasion a punchline eluded her.

Leaving the theatre, it struck me that Conti is perhaps a victim of her own success; she throws her voice so well that, at the moment, it’s easy to forget that she’s doing it. For any comedian to have won as much laughter and applause from the Corn Exchange crowd over 90 minutes with such a heavy degree of improvisation would have been impressive. To do it as a ventriloquist, though, is quite something else. The oddly strained gag can be more than forgiven for the cartoonish charm with which Conti carried the evening.