Nina Conti: Whose Face Is It Anyway?, Brighton Dome review - a melee of jubilant spontaneity

“I really am the repository for all your shit,” Nina Conti’s famous Monkey hand puppet tells her. Monkey may have a point.

The brilliance of Conti’s ventriloquism is that it seems to burst, unedited, from her id. Filth, surrealism and lightning-fast gags spume in a torrent whenever her teeth are closed tight. Her non-puppet stage persona is, by contrast, all light and loveliness, apparently bemused by what’s being dredged up. Quite apart from how she has the Brighton Dome in stitches, watched purely on the level of technical skill and psychological tightrope walking, her shows are astonishing. She only gets better as the years pass.

The evening’s support act is Australian comedian Sarah Kendall, who may be best-known for winning the TV gameshow Taskmaster a couple of years back. Given she only has about 20 minutes, she does a solid job warming the crowd up, notably with a routine about explaining hypersexualised pop lyrics to her tween daughter.

Nina Conti, clad in a black mini-dress, begins by jovially laying out ground rules. The show is highly interactive and she makes it clear that no-one should feel uncomfortable, right down to warning that the facemasks she later uses are unsuitable for anyone with a latex allergy. The night is wholly improvised, which adds a bright tingle of tension to proceedings. Conti may only be with us for an hour but she’s absolutely and intensely “on” for every moment.

First of all, she and Monkey survey the front rows, particularly pleased to find a church pastor there. He is the first on stage when Monkey is relegated to his basket. The masks Conti puts on her volunteers cover the lower half of the face, chin-to-nostril, the mouth controlled by a cable she holds as she gives them voices of her choosing. A pastor might have been an easy target for brutal mockery by some comedians, but Conti, while making the churchman sweary and observing that “the world has gone to shit”, simply riffs cannily on a version of who he is. It is no less funny for the lack of viciousness.

A brother and sister are next, a mental health nurse and a cleaner, given ridiculous ventriloquised cartoon voices. It’s extraordinary how agile Conti’s response is to their every physical twitch, tuning her narrative to their body movements. New York musical comedian Becky Goodman and her guitar join proceedings from hereon, adding song-singing to the general palaver. The eventual result is an uproarious sequence which suggests both siblings relax at the end of a long week by giving plenty of blow jobs. It brings the house down.There is then an agony aunt advice section with Monkey. Conti is behind a screen, “giving her mouth a break”. She asks audience members to queue. At first no-one does, then there’s suddenly a horde. Their issues are such gifts to a comedian that, at first, I thought a couple of them must be plants. One young woman complains that her 13-year-old- brother parades around the house naked. A man in a cowboy hat resents that he was born with a sixth toe on one foot, which his mother had removed when he was a baby.

The latter – and his mum – both given outrageous hick American accents, are next onstage, along with a woman who can’t decide whether she wants a dog, another who wants to kills her boyfriend, and a post-natal nurse. The melee of ventriloquised interactions between them is chaotic yet welded to a deranged narrative, with blow jobs once again returning for the punchline. All conflicts are resolved with a comic flourish.

Nina Conti is not a comedian in the sense that she relies on jokes. Everything derives from what’s human and happening now, her loving but madcap response to it. In a world where everything is captured then done, being in the one-off moment with her is just a massive treat. In her own very unique field, she’s a genius.

• Nina Conti's current tour is Sold Out but she tours again in Sept/Oct
• More comedy reviews on theartsdesk

Below: watch four minutes of Nina Conti and Monkey sparring with their audience