Nina Conti: The Dating Show review – joy and chaos with the magical matchmaker

Is there an act anywhere in comedy as machine-tooled to make us laugh as Nina Conti’s? I don’t mean her ventriloquism with her sidekick Monkey, which is excellent, and which she’s always experimenting with – as with tonight’s closer, when she and the puppet swap voices. I mean that trusty routine in which she slaps masks on the faces of her audience volunteers, and gives voice to them in loopy dialogues and scenes. For me, it never stops being joyfully funny – and generous, too, because the eye is drawn to how comical her stooges are being, whereas, off the ball, it’s Conti who’s pulling off several difficult tricks at a time.

Her current tour finds a (slightly) new context for the act. The Dating Show is in Southend to help its audience find love – or escape it, in the case of one volunteer who touts for a new boyfriend, and rejects her existing one, in song. (“Rescue me from Sean!”) Kicking off to an initially timid audience, it opens by recreating one couple’s first meeting at a Manchester chocolate workshop. In a later skit, Conti pounces on a schoolteacher’s expressive hand gestures, and has him yearn in song (guitar stage-right by Dan Attfield) for a girlfriend who will “squeeze him by the balls”.

That’s an improviser’s skill, and Conti has it in abundance – that alertness to the potentially fruitful detail, which she’ll pick up on and work into scenes of unexpected delight. There’s an interlude post-interval in which Conti appears in lifesize Monkey costume to speed-date members of the audience – and it’s the weakest section, partly because the cumbersome suit cramps her light-on-the-feet style.

But the final set-piece is a masterful 20 minutes of organised chaos, as Conti plays all the voice parts in a six-person scene set in an erotic fire station. Her human dummies, liberated from self-consciousness by their cartoonish face masks, pitch in gamely as Conti matchmakes, spins vocal plates, and orchestrates inappropriately saucy interactions between the mum and two grownup kids, among others, assembled onstage. Timidity overcome, all is laughter in the stalls: Conti’s great act has worked its magic again.

• Nina Conti: The Dating Show is touring until 28 February.