There’s a moment, halfway through this brain-melting solo show, when writer and performer Michael Anderson casually drops the phrase “consciousness, reality and time”. He’s actually setting up a sweet little parable about the transcendent value of love – but he’ll be taking in some quantum theory along the way. Projected in the background, faintly trippy animations show Elvis Presley falling through mathematical fractals and abstract art appearing across the night sky. You get the picture: this show’s a conceptual onslaught, and sometimes it overwhelms its own core themes. But if you surrender yourself to the rush of ideas, it’s also a freewheeling joy.

Anderson’s a master of the parody proof: a convincing chain of reasoning built on a shaky premise, which can ultimately support whatever conclusion you want it to. He can show us, for example, that he saved the world by being born; his mother on the other hand was responsible for Elvis’s rise to fame, and he has the ticket stub to prove it. Yet there’s genuine philosophical insight tucked away amidst the mischief. The intellectual mystery tour visits chaos theory, musical critique, and the nature of narrative itself – and each stop offers intriguing ideas to ponder or enjoy.

This is often very funny. Anderson’s theory on the origins of the Black Death blurs correlation and causation, but also confirms my deeply held suspicion that a certain apparatus was contrived by Lucifer himself. In another segment, he shares a reverential oration to the humble Oreo, before demonstrating live on stage that we’ve all been eating them wrong. It’s that agile mix of the divine and the mundane, the profound and the silly, the true and the invented which lends his discourse its unique comic tone.

But is it a show? For the first half-hour, we might as well have been watching on YouTube: it’s an animation with a voiceover, and it doesn’t gain all that much from the voice being there in the room. It’s only when he hits that Oreo moment that Anderson moves to centre stage, while a highly physical, near-slapstick riposte to Shakespearean purists builds further momentum later on. By that point, though, the show’s almost over. A light restructuring might set a stronger theatrical presence, and spark that sense of communal experience that live performance can bring.

It’s also just a lot. There are meaningful themes here, about erasure and reconstruction and the embrace of things we cannot control, but if I hadn’t been making notes to write this review I’m not sure I’d have remembered them. Or maybe the message doesn’t need to stick; maybe it’s enough to enjoy the ride? An entertaining show can be sculpted from chaos – and in this case, Anderson really does prove it.