The “dead dad show” is a fringe comedy staple. But what about the dead not-quite-an-uncle show? Ben Target is a comedian who, by his own account, never quite delivered on the promise identified by his best fringe newcomer nomination more than a decade ago. Well, he delivers something very lovely here, with an autobiographical hour about the time he spent as end-of-life carer for his adopted uncle, a maverick live-in colleague of his grandparents and “the only adult with whom [Target] ever felt safe”.
The show flits between timelines to recount Target’s relationship with Lorenzo, a fugitive from a rackety Hong Kong upbringing, later expelled from Cuba by Fidel Castro himself – for being too cheeky, some say, or for being a spy. In a childhood not overflowing with affection, Lorenzo was Target’s refuge, a surrogate dad who preferred silly to serious and freedom to convention. Fifteen years on, Target finds himself sole carer to his former mentor: bathing him, giving him morphine and cleaning up his mess – before watching his own life swirl down the plughole with all the Dettol, blood and poo.
There are discernible moments in the show when Lorenzo’s lovable eccentricities start to curdle, and Target’s commitment to caring twists into resentment. In a show directed by Adam Brace before his premature death in April, there’s no flinching from the pain of palliative care. But it is a joyful and philosophical show, too, about caring’s reciprocal flow, and the surprising shapes it can come in, as Lorenzo teaches his slightly broken young charge the difference between eastern and western carpentry, and Target ribbon-dances to mark the arrival of his uncle’s hi-tech new loo.
A committed oddball as a comedian, Target doesn’t sentimentalise this: we begin to understand, indeed, why he is not a man to dwell on his feelings. But the lovelessness of his upbringing, and so the value of Lorenzo, is felt all the sharper for not being laboured, in this heartfelt hour about tough times and the people who quietly help us survive them.
• At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
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