STEVE Delaney produced a superb performance as the delusional show business ‘Colossasus’ Count Arthur Strong at Buxton Opera House.

The Alive and Unplugged show offers new material and a sci-fi B-movie featuring The Count, which showcase brilliant wordplay from the unique comic character created by Delaney.

We see Arthur in all his pompous, self-righteous glory, with Delaney doing what he does best, combining hilarious, malapropism-littered dialogue with physical and facial tics to memorable effect.

The solo show features few props, leaving the audience to focus instead on the Count as he draws us into his bizarre, slightly unhinged, world.

The seemingly rambling but in reality meticulously-crafted monologues are interspersed with Arthur’s appearance as the saviour of the Earth in a film from his ‘glittering TV career’, an affectionate homage to science fiction B-movies of the 1950s.

Other highlights of the evening include a clever ventriloquism act in which Arthur struggles to subdue the cantankerous dummy, a Jackanory-style story, which like all his tales, veers wildly off into apparently unrelated subjects, and a bizarre version of The Last Supper.

Delaney’s skill is to make the ordinary extraordinary by virtue of his ability to use everyday situations as the starting point for stream of consciousness rants at a myriad of problems Arthur encounters, such as cat’s mess and mountains of Bags for Life and everything in between.

While the material fell a little flat on occasions, Alive and Unplugged offers a brilliantly-executed combination of verbal and physical humour from a character who offers up a mirror to our own sense of self-importance and pretensions while inviting us to laugh knowingly at his.