MARK FISHER gives the thumbs up to Alan Bissett’s hilarious creation.

I WAS HALF expecting Alan Bissett to turn up in drag in his acclaimed one-man comedy. I knew he'd be playing Moira Bell, a middle-aged mother of two from Falkirk (pronounced without the vowels), so I thought he'd at least be wearing a wig. But no, the novelist, who has been showing an increasing interest in theatre of late, takes to the stage in a decidedly unfeminine jeans and black T-shirt combo.

He gets no closer to Dick Emery than crossing his arms beneath an imagined bosom, putting his weight on his left hip and pointing his right leg out to the side. In every other respect, he is a young man standing in front of a sofa.

This makes his hilarious achievement even more remarkable. Wordsmith that he is, he trusts his writing – and our imaginations – to do the work that others might leave to a bad-taste costume and garish make-up. This Moira Bell is no pantomime dame and, although Bissett makes light of her limited horizons and short-circuiting logic, he is not interested in parodying womanhood. Drawing endlessly on a cigarette and never considering she might be in the wrong, Moira can seem a ridiculous figure, but you get the impression Bissett is very fond of her.

In a series of a half-dozen monologues, delivered with immaculate comic timing, Moira chats to an unseen friend, relating her scrapes defending her dog Pepe from a neighbour's rottweiler, accompanying her son's English teacher to the Citizens Theatre in a misguided attempt to chat him up, and explaining her all-Jock-Tamson's-bairns political philosophy that excludes more people than it embraces. Despite her flawed logic, she is perceptive in her analysis of the class divide and the patronising assumption that she should be dissatisfied being the person she is.

However hilarious it gets – and I have heard no audience on this year's Edinburgh Fringe laugh as wholeheartedly as in the National Library of Scotland – Bissett plays it absolutely straight. Whether Moira is trying to get a dog to give an apology or attempting to sum up the highlights of an impenetrable production of The Taming of the Shrew, Bissett is always on her indignant side. This, of course, only makes a laugh-a-minute show even funnier.

The Moira Monologues is at Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, on 4 September 2010.

© Mark Fisher, 2010

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• Mark Fisher’s Scottish Theatre Blog