‘I make a living as a stand up comedian, and I find it unbelievable,’ says Trevor Lock.

For tThose who’ve delighted in Lock’s elliptical, surreal, often highly improvised act might not share his disbelief, but they might not believe that this is the first year that the comedian is doing a full hour-long stand-up show at the Fringe – the excellent reviews he’s been garnering in Edinburgh for over 10 years have been for his comic plays.

In fact, he’s doing one of those this year too, The One and the Many, a fleet-footed exploration of the subjectivity of experience in which Lock’s character’s life is thrown into turmoil after encountering a woman whose beauty is so great that no man can look at her.

I ask him what it’s like going from the one show to the other. ‘It’s tough. It’s tough to do stand-up after a full day’s work, especially when I’m trying to do an hour and it’s not scripted. I have to create it,’ Lock tells me.

He’s perched on a chair in the Such Small Portions studio, and, like everywhere else in Edinburgh during a very humid opening weekend, it’s uncomfortably warm. ‘Doing a play in a very hot room saps energy, and then I’m going on stage at 8pm in a hotter room, and I am just exhausted. But when it goes well, the stand-up’s wonderful.

It’s an extraordinary feeling – you’re an air traffic controller, bringing these ideas in to land, stacking them up, waiting to let them in.’ Does he enjoy it more than doing the play? ‘There’s no preference. I’m schizophrenic. Sometimes it’s the stand-up, sometimes it’s the play. When you’ve written something, and the performance is going well, and the audience get it, that’s also a lovely feeling.

For something you first wrote on your phone on the way back from a gig to have been finessed, and rehearsed, and now people are watching it and you’re backstage going, oh my God, that actually works – that’s kind of magic.’

Trevor Lock is appearing in Some Kind of Fool, 4pm at the GRV as part of the Five Pound Fringe. Tickets £5

And if that sounds interesting, here are some other comedians who are doing – more or less – serious theatrical shows at the Fringe this year.

Daniel Kitson
Stardom might’ve beckoned for Daniel Kitson following his Perrier win in 2002. But rather than embarking on a quest to dominate the DVD shelves and tea-towels of the land, Kitson has stuck to what he does best: standing in front of an audience and making them laugh, something at which he is, in the opinion of this writer, pretty much as good as it gets.

Which is reflected in the fact that, at the time of writing, his stand-up show is completely sold out. But you can also catch Kitson in The Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church, a comedic monologue about one man’s preparing for death, playing at the Traverse.

Phil Nicol
Although Phil Nicol’s standup is very different from Daniel Kitson’s – where Kitson is measured and acerbic, Nicol is manically energetic – they are akin insofar as Nicol is also a brilliantly talented former Perrier winner who to an extent has shunned the limelight since his win in 2006.

Nicol is also a huge sucker for punishment, with three shows at the Fringe this year. As well as his stand-up show, A Deadpan Poet Sings Quiet Songs Quietly… He’s appearing in Gregory Burke’s Gagarin Way – its first Edinburgh revival since the smash success of its Edinburgh debut in 2001 – and Sheridan’s farce The School for Scandal as part of an all star cast including fellow stand-ups Stephen K Amos and Marcus Brigstocke, and light entertainment legend Lionel Blair.

Russell Kane
One of the brightest young starts of the comedy circuit, and an if.comedy nominee from 2008, Russell Kane is looking to repeat the success of last year’s Fakespeare: the Lamentable Tragedie of Yates’s Wine Lodge, a comic, satirical play written in blank verse which ultimately gained a – brief – transfer to Stratford-upon-Avon.

This year we are being treated to the exploits of Nigellio, an Essex banker, in Fakespeare: the Tragical Saveings of King Nigel. Expect cock jokes and iambic pentameter in equal measure. If prose is more your thing than poetry, Kane’s stand-up show Human Dressage is also at the Pleasance.

Mark Watson
Mark Watson’s epic, 24-hour stand-up shows are now part of the folklore of the Fringe; whether this year’s instalment will turn out to be – as it’s billed – the last ever remains to be seen.

What is not in doubt is that, even if it is, audiences will not be left short of chances to catch Watson, who is also performing The Mark Watson Edit and Mark Watson’s Earth Summit, as well as The Hotel, a freeform promenade comedy installation performance about the disintegration of a hotelier’s life.

If you’re not sure what that involves then, well, we probably aren’t that sure either – Jez Scharf, a stand-up who appears in the show, described it as ‘incredibly difficult to describe’ – Perhaps the closest analogue is something like Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death – but funny.

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