Butt Kapinski (Liquid Rooms, Edinburgh)

Butt Kapinski's a dick – a private dick. Or, as he might put it, a pwivate dick. Played by Deanna Fleysher, director of the crazy-ass clown Red Bastard, Kapinski's a slobbering, speech-defective detective who comes with his own in-built streetlamp sticking out of the upturned collar of his beige mac.

More pertinently, he's a spoof of every film noir hero, oozing slick masculinity and brooding quietly on the world's darkness. Such men seemed to storm pop culture in 1930s America – the aftermath of the war-wearied youth washed out by the roaring twenties. Kapinski, however, has none of their suaveness – for all that he believes otherwise. He's a letchy, little gumball of a guy; a C-grade hero with a penchant for the seedier side of the city, spouting similes like Dan Brown on heat.

We are that city. Sat on a scattering of chairs, as Kapinski moves between us, we become the cast of his own private film noir: murder victims and two-bit cops, chatty cab drivers and Catholic priests. Kapinski sidles past your chair then – blam – with a creak of her anglepoise streetlamp throws the spotlight on you. Not that it's about humiliation: this is a collaborative act, playing along and fooling around. You know these tropes. Now's your chance to skewer them.

Brilliantly, Fleysher inverts the godawful gender politics of the original genre. Women get to play policemen and murderers, while men are reduced to bodies and – wonderfully – the street-walkers of the red light districts. In one dream of a sequence, she has a roomful of men posing seductively as peepshow girls, while the women play punters, masturbating away. "Finish on your bwoad," Kapinski splutters. "Finish on your bwoad." That's what you come to the Fringe for, right?

Butt Kapinski runs at the Liquid Rooms as part of the PBH Free Fringe until 31 August