Storytelling, they say, is an almost lost art. Well, not while Benet Brandreth is around, it's not. Brandreth, Sandhurst graduate and a lawyer by day, studied Philosophy at Cambridge and has packed rather a lot into his life, real or imagined. He weaves a fantastical tale charting his story from graduation to last year - when, not for the first time, he saved the life of a member of the royal family.

In Seven Years in the Bathroom, which he premiered at last year's Edinburgh Fringe, Alex Horne attempts to shoehorn the average man's 79-year lifespan - in which he says a remarkable seven years is spent in the bathroom - into an hour's comedy. It's certainly high-concept, and there's an awful lot of comedy to be mined from the subject.

The journey from the Edinburgh Fringe to a UK tour or London residency can be a fraught one. What works in the context of the world's biggest and best arts festival, where even in established venues there's often a whiff of “let's do the show right here!” shambolism, can, in the confines of a professional theatre space, be met with irritation rather than affection.

It has been 16 years since Alexei Sayle last performed as a stand-up, save the very occasional charity gig, so there was a proper sense of occasion at the Soho Theatre when he came on stage. The old lefty, brought up in a Stalinist household in Liverpool, was alternative comedy's biggest name back in the 1980s and the scourge of the Thatcher government, so how would his sneering, disdainful political material fare now?

Bubbles are emanating from Simon Munnery's head. They're streaming out of a huge, black stovepipe hat which he has cobbled together from cardboard and sticky tape. He has also slung an electric guitar over his shoulder as he sidles up to the mic to begin Hats Off to the 101ers, and Other Material. What does he look like? A cranky mishmash. Kids' entertainer or mad Victorian undertaker? Fortysomething geek or indie rocker?

Angie Le Mar, who recently celebrated 25 years in showbusiness, has certainly packed a lot into her life; she's a comic, writer, director, radio presenter and producer, and now has written and performs In My Shoes, her new one-woman show (directed by Femi Elufowoju), a collection of six interwoven characters. It follows her first stage outing, as the writer of Do You Know Where Your Daughter Is?, a thought-provoking account of the sexual and domestic abuse of young women.

Clowning, despite its association with great funnymen such as Joseph Grimaldi and Charlie Chaplin, has always had a dark underside of melancholy or even menace. More latterly it has been thought of in terms of “low” arts such as circus and street theatre, and so it perhaps shouldn't come as a surprise that fear of clowns, coulrophobia, is in the Top 10 list of phobias, up there with spiders, enclosed spaces and vomiting.