Damien Warren-Smith in Garry Starr: Classic Penguins [Austin Ruffer]

SOMEHOW I missed that Garry Starr: Classic Penguins would be performed in the nude by Australian comedian Damien Warren-Smith, so be warned.

It starts innocently enough. While we wait, we watch a film of penguins clutching the distinctive orange-striped paperbacks as they waddle through an ice-swept landscape. On stage there’s a bookcase on one side and a travelling chest on the other. Starr sits in a swivel chair with his back to us.

When he turns round, we see he is clad only in coat tails, a top hat, an Elizabethan ruff and orange flippers – even these are soon discarded.

He claims to enact every Penguin classic ever written in 65 minutes, which isn’t strictly true, but it’s a wild ride.

He is an extraordinary comic, clown and acrobat. He piles on the bawdy humour thick and fast, but quickly settles into a rhythm that uses live camera, music, sound and audience interaction to great effect.

The theme from Hitchcock’s Psycho and Moby’s hit Porcelain are imaginatively employed. JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye involves him catching rolled-up balls of mouldy bread in his mouth. Often a skit illustrating one title morphs into another: grapes are used liberally for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which descends into a food fight, followed by citrus fruit for Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

Amazingly, after a while we forget Starr is actually naked, though you’ll never think of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in quite the same way again.

Directed by Cal McCrystal, Classic Penguins is big, brash and bold, surprisingly warm-hearted and – I’ll take a bet – unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Age Recommendation: 18+
Until January 3
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