Punch

Mr Punch has not aged well. It's not the body that's feeling it - played by Matthew Jones, he still has the wiry energy that served in his battles against the policeman and the devil - but the mind. Besieged by a crocodile and the guardians of public taste, he is regretting that cheeky tweet about the missing girl and his wife has either left him, or if his habits have run true, is underneath his floorboards somewhere.

Steven Bloomer's new play Punch gives the perverse puppet a new lease of life. Although he ought to be unfashionable now - his end of the pier shtick and stick has the bitter taste of a 1970s' comedian, all misogynistic violence and shrill antagonism - he finds himself cobbling together a living as a shock stand up. Intent on renouncing "the joke," he builds a routine on his recent misadventures. Inevitably, the coppers haul him in, bruised baby in tow.

Flickering between extracts of his turn and the subsequent interview with a social worker, Punch is the unlikely defender of the contemporary comic. His style reflects both the self-aware ramblings of Stuart Lee and the more brutal likes of Frankie Boyle, and he slowly sucks the social worker into his world, where crocodiles attack and a prank ends in body trauma.

Matthew Jones is astonishing as Punch, holding a charisma that almost obscures his innate villainy: Bloomer's scripts makes allusions to Punch's true nature in a series of subtle references. The defence of nasty humour (and Punch laughs at everything from childhood abuse to cancer) is convincing, while the thin line between comedic savagery and genuine horror is crossed and recrossed.

Punch comprehensively lays out the arguments around the current trend for offensive comedy, rehashing the arguments put forward by every generation of taboo-busting stand ups from Lenny Bruce to Denis Leary and evoking that scene in Name of the Rose, when the monk worries that laughter can destroy even the most sacred devotion. Whether Punch himself is funny, or even meant to be, is a moot point: Bloomer has found a way to ask difficult questions about the role of comedy and put the moral scares in a deeper historical context.