Last year a movie called Festival revelled in sordid goings-on behind the scenes at the Edinburgh fringe. Many stereotypical fringe types were lampooned, but none as mercilessly as Irish stand-up comedians. They were portrayed as drink-sodden, morally vacuous saps who made a grubby living by exposing their pathetic failings on stage.

Kevin McAleer is the perfect antidote. The Northern Irish comic puts on a show that is a world away from the type we are used to seeing from his southern colleagues, which can be reminiscent of a drunk falling down an escalator for 90 minutes.

Instead McAleer’s show, Chalk and Cheese, is a monologue of deftness and subtlety that is more akin to drama than comedy. Its strength is its controlled restraint.

Coming on stage unannounced, and therefore without applause, McAleer deliberately creates an atmosphere of unease. This is one of the bravest things that a performer can do. He establishes a distance between himself and his audience, then slowly and meticulously draws them in.

Looking around nervously, the grey-haired 49-year-old starts with an unlikely opening line, mumbled into the microphone: “I can’t say much tonight.” Then a long, edgy pause. “They are onto me.”

“They” are the unseen watchers who scrutinise his every move. His paranoia is total. When he sees on a street map a big arrow saying “you are here”, he wonders how “they” were able to find him so quickly. When he listens to the radio and hears the DJ saying “you are listening to 106.5FM” he wonders how “they” knew.

The character’s mismatch with the conventions of normal life is slowly revealed to us through oblique detail. This is a man for whom nothing is as it seems. When he reads on the corn flakes packet, “we don’t make corn flakes for anyone else,” he knows for a fact that is a lie — he has seen other people buying the packets in the supermarket. Similarly, when he sees, written on a bottle of bleach, “keep away from children”, he takes it as an outrageous personal slight.

McAleer’s character is determined that “they” will not get one over on him, so he is always on his guard. Such an approach can have unfortunate consequences. In a graveyard, seeing an tombstone inscription that says “only sleeping”, he naturally needs to check if this is true. He invariably discovers the departed is, in fact, dead. He also discovers that the families of the departed rarely appreciate being informed of their error.

Some comedy derives its humour from its randomness. At times McAleer can seem as if he is taking the audience down avenues picked at random by a disorientated and lost soul. But in fact each step is carefully choreographed. His surrealist touches — lambs kept in a tank in a restaurant, for example — are not random at all. They all serve to reveal something telling in characterisation or narrative, and are cleverly revisited throughout the monologue.

Overlaid on the comic tales of paranoia are religious overtones that mine McAleer’s Catholicism. Is this bonkers character really a Christ figure? Some of the religious references strike home, but while they might be immediately grasped by an audience in Temple Bar or Londonderry, they were in danger of going over the heads of a crowd in Presbyterian Edinburgh.

It is not to disparage McAleer’s timing or the spontaneity of his performance to suggest that Chalk and Cheese would work as well written down as it does on stage. Everything necessary to understand this character is there in the twists and turns of the words, which create a world that is full of the fantastical and grotesque, but still rings true.

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