Nina Conti, Menier Chocolate Factory

You don’t see much ventriloquism these days. It’s a comedy form mostly associated with variety and Victorian music hall - although it goes back at least to the Greeks - and gives a lot of people the heebie-jeebies. I know several people who can’t watch Michael Redgrave’s chilling performance as the unbalanced ventriloquist Maxwell Frere, who believes his dummy is alive, in the 1945 Ealing horror film Dead of Night. And it’s Psych 1.01 to appreciate there may be some serious emotional issues in performers who can express themselves only through an inanimate doll - the words “multiple”, “personality” and “disorder” spring to mind.

But Nina Conti, a comic and actress (who can currently be heard in repeats of Harry Venning’s brilliant sitcom Clare in the Community on Radio 4) has revitalised the form in British entertainment. In this she has been much aided by her recent collaboration with writer Bill Dare, with whom she developed Speak to the Hand, which was an audience and critical hit at last year's Edinburgh Fringe. I think it’s fair to say that Conti, who started performing in 2002, was coasting for a while with an act based largely around her original dummy, a small, foul-mouthed and hilariously horny monkey called Monk, but with this show has entered a different league of technical and writerly achievement.

She has added a few more puppets/characters - “They’re all shit,” says Monk, in the first of many deconstructive barbs in a show cleverly built on several layers of knowingness - which allow Conti to give her voice skills a good run out. The puppets all have disconcertingly believable features and movements, and you find yourself watching them as they speak, as it were. Leonard the Owl sounds a little like a posh Monk, but Nana the Scottish grandmother is simply superb and comes as a fully formed and loveable character, while Lydia, supposedly recently acquired from another vent act, has great potential.

Conti has given Lydia a brassy New York showbiz voice and could be channelling Liza Minnelli, Elaine Stritch and Joan Rivers but isn’t happy with her accent, so she asks the audiences for suggestions for what she could change it to, and Conti obliges with Texan, Norwegian, French and others until someone suggests Geordie. “Can you do Geordie?” asks Lydia. “No? Well then neither can I.” It’s a brilliantly conceived - and timed - joke.

Conti does a fair bit of audience interaction and last night found an animator in the front row - “With your hand up my arse I could do pirouettes,” Monk says, quick as a flash - who with another punter helped Conti in a brilliant reworking of another variety staple, the blindfolded “psychic”. It was given a nice postmodern twist as first Nana and then Conti were blindfolded and had to guess how many fingers were being held up and then what the audience member had written on a pad.

A segment involving Nana spoof-calling a hotel to reserve a room fell flat but it was the only misstep in a superbly conceived and executed hour’s entertainment. Even the automatonophobics would be converted.

• Book tickets for Nina Conti at Menier Chocolate Factory until 15 May
• Find Clare in the Community on Amazon