Scott Agnew review – intimate standup set tackles HIV diagnosis

At this year’s Edinburgh fringe the lines between comedy, therapy and healing have been smudged – explicitly so in Glaswegian comic Scott Agnew’s show I’ve Snapped My Banjo String, Let’s Just Talk. It traces Agnew’s sex life from his 2012 show Tales of the Sauna to his being diagnosed as HIV positive last year. His delivery (twitchy, forever restarting his sentences, veering between swagger and hesitancy) suggests a man still coming to terms with a diagnosis that, he jokes here, “actually increases my life expectancy in Glasgow”.

There remains a stigma around the virus, which he challenges in the show, playing down the condition with reference to his medicated grandad, who is jealous that Agnew needs to take only one pill per day. (“There’s fuck all wrang wi ye …!”)

Before the intensely personal – and political – HIV material, the show offers a history of Agnew’s sexual, and sometimes chem-sexual, adventures (the precarious toilet trip in a Prague sex club; a Grindr date gone wrong) with a side order of plain-speaking about his addictive behaviour and suicidal impulses. The anecdotes are engaging, even if Agnew’s brand of dissolution and debauchery feels par for the outre comedy course. And there are unconvincing moments – like the caricature of Shoreditch TV producers stymying his career. But it’s the open-wound intimacy of Agnew’s HIV material, finally, that makes the show distinctive.

• At the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, until 29 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.