The Bad Arm (Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh)

Máire Clerkin's sub-title – "Confessions of a Dodgy Irish Dancer" – promises more than it delivers. It's a charming autobiographical solo turn of an Irish girl in north London jumping in and out of her dancing shoes, finding boyfriends, performing in public, turning punk and ending up as a judge and a teacher. That's it.

She has a slight handicap that causes a problem: her right arms sticks out a bit, a bad thing in an Irish dancer whose body must stay rigid, arms by the side, while the feet do the talking. But just as you can only play the trumpet badly if you first play it well, Clerkin's a Riverdance-standard hoofer with a flaw, and her fancy footwork and gliding, gazelle-like movement are a joy.

She never answers the question, though: why is Irish dancing inherently funny and absurd, all that fixed smiling, jigging up and down, and bendy bravura? And was it borderline naff even before Michael Flatley came along?

Clerkin is one of five children growing up in Crouch End and Cricklewood, with holidays in County Monahan with her cousins, bus rides to dance competitions, and all the petty rivalries of an unexceptional girlhood.

She's engagingly descriptive about the mixed race melting pot of London, the country fair where a lad sticks his tongue down her throat in the back of a car, the tensions of competition where she flops after a night on the booze. And when she lets rip with the dancing, you really do see the point of her living and you watching. But, in the end, for all Clerkin's appeal, The Bad Arm's a talk, not a show, complete with too many family snapshots and black drapes.

The Bad Arm runs at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh until 31 August.