Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

Eric Lampaert's a comedian, but this is not a comedy, whatever its category in the Fringe programme says. And that's because the things that happened to him are decidedly not funny.

In 2019 he woke up with amnesia. Beyond a hack Hollywood plot device, the terrifying reality is that having no recollection of who he was, of all the memories that define him, is a major psychological trauma that took him 18 months to even start emerging from. He tells us not only of grieving for his own human essence but for everyone he ever knew, all wiped from his consciousness without him quite realising who he is missing.

‘How did it happen?’ is apparently the most common question he gets - and it’s an unanswerable one. Nonetheless this complicated, highly theatrical show has a bash.

The rare occasions he talks candidly about his experiences, as best he can, are enthralling. But they are also very limited. Lampaert feels he’s not yet in a place to discuss this head-on, so retreats into an alter-ego to convey an emotional journey rather than a literal one. In this there’s a parallel with fellow Gaulier clown-school graduate Elf Lyons’s show.

The audience are therefore left a bit discombobulated as he fudges the nature of reality in disjoined theatrical sketches deploying his intense physicality and uniquely malleable features.

Given every memory is broken, nothing can be trusted, Lampaert asserts 

The show loosely takes the form of a hypnosis session, with an unseen therapist counting very slowly back from ten, each number triggering dissonant memories and fragments of mind-warping theories from quantum mechanics, ancient mythologies and cosmology. He draws conclusions that sound profound, but don’t really make sense, such as philosophising that ‘I is imaginary because i is imaginary’ – i being the theoretical mathematical square root of -1. From that description of his rantings, you will probably not be surprised to learn that the comic has been an enthusiastic smoker of weed.

These are the sort of unhinged things he told his doctors, and maybe these symptoms of his short-circuited brain made more sense to a trained medic than they will to an audience.

There are a couple of routines close to anecdotal  stand-up, most notably one about ending up in a drug-fuelled sex party in the Hollywood Hills hours after being released from the psych ward, which was surely not healthy. Although it did trigger a muscle memory of a heckle putdown – even when all else is lost the remnants of his stand-up instincts remain.

Another story tells of him terrifying his tiny niece and nephew when he went too Method playing monsters.  He convincingly becomes psychotic on stage, too - a snarling, feral ball of inexpressible emotions towards the audience, with the untied straightjacket he wears for much of the hour only adding to the disconcerting effect.

It’s but a fraction of what he went through, of course, but means that Zero Minus One is not an easy watch, the deliberately confusing presentation adding to the discomfort, knowing we can never truly understand his traumatic experience.  Fans of intense theatre may get most out of this – as the challenging piece is a long way from a comedian using the Fringe to try to wangle a Taskmaster booking.

Review date: 13 Aug 2026
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just The Tonic at The Caves