Tired of the nonsenses of modern life? Frazzled by salesmanship posing as friendliness? Rhod Gilbert feels your pain. Actually, no: Rhod Gilbert feels his own pain. And turns his bile into something beautiful in his finest hour of stand-up yet.

Until now, the 40-year-old Welsh comic had never quite matched the intense silliness of his first Fringe show in 2005, in which he detailed his life in the fictional Welsh town of Llanbobl. But after turning his lies into his living for a few years, he decided it was time to observe things as they really are.

The only problem? “The real world is madder than anything I could make up,” spits Gilbert, detailing his life playing corporate gigs and flipping out at Knutsford service station on the M6. Now every comic in the world has talked about crappy service stations and surly salespeople. But no puny piece of paper could harness the way Gilbert turns his disappointment into this fairground ride of fury. He pastes all sorts of other concerns - his shrinking libido, his dicky bladder - into a narrative that culminates with him tired and hungry at 2.30am, confronted with one single “award-winning” mince pie to eat. “Normally you'd let that go, wouldn't you?” he fumes, before telling us about the mayhem he caused by demanding to know what award this pastry actually won.

By marrying his fantastical leanings to mundane reality, Gilbert takes all his strengths - his dark dubiousness, his frenetic flights of fancy - and lets us enjoy his rage as our own. “It's time to get back to Llanbobl,” he says at the end. But what he's actually done is convince us that we all live in a made-up world. And done it with a propulsive charm that's a joy to behold.

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