Mark Steel has endured a fairly wretched time since his last show at Warwick Arts Centre almost exactly two years ago.

In the interim he’s been diagnosed, treated and thankfully now recovered from throat cancer, an experience he relates in The Leopard In My House, a book about his ordeal, and his accompanying live shows.

The title refers to the tumour - a beast he gets accustomed to living with and seems confident ‘the leopard authorities’ will ultimately handle, but is still unnerved by hearing the occasional growl - and the show pulls few punches in covering all elements of his physical and mental anguish.

Which would be horrific if not for Steel’s deft mix of affable, sarcastic and deadpan humour as well as brilliant way with a creative (and typically exaggerated) metaphor, all of which were employed to hilarious effect throughout.

The show kicked off with some familiar ‘grumpy old lefty’ schtick - raised to heights his peers can’t match courtesy of wonderfully inventive/ridiculous flights of fancy and some note-perfect accents and impersonations - to set the audience at ease before the heavier content kicked in.

In truth, and in Steel’s hands, it was never that heavy - although he warned us that some audience members had fainted at previous shows - and if anything was far more educational and almost spiritual than graphic or gross, certainly in terms of the practicalities of his treatment and the unlikely friendships he forged along the way.

Which still sounds deeper and darker than the show ever got. In reality the laughs were almost constant - Steel’s eye for a joke, way with words and ability to mock himself as well as absurdity (usually by being even more absurd) the perfect antidote to the horrors he was describing. There was barely even a pause at the interval, which he largely spent at a keyboard performing vintage musical hall numbers, earning the occasional singalong and the biggest laugh of the night courtesy of the type of joke you’d hear in a working men’s club in the 1970s. The irony was evident to performer and audience alike, but felt entirely appropriate on a night when we were all in it together, laughing at the incongruity of life and delighted to have the old stager on such fabulous form.

5 stars

Reviewed by Steve Adams at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, on Friday 16 May.

Photo credit: Aemen Sukkar