Lucy Porter's Love In, Arts Theatre, London

A breezy tale of obsessive love

Lucy Porter's contribution to the subject of love is to state that it is a mental illness. Nothing new there, perhaps, but Porter uses the statement to reflect back on her previous experience of obsession, from the point of view of someone who suffered from obsessive compulsive order. Her experiences range from having had to get out of bed repeatedly to touch her radiator, to a need to groom constantly while in the throes of a new relationship, all the way down the scale to having songs for each household chore (eg "I'm Washing Up" is sung to the tune of Diana Ross's "I'm Coming Out"), a quirk she weighs up in light of the likely response to it by a possible suitor.

Straddling the line between affected and loveable, friendly and over-ingratiating, Porter's delivery is breathless, a trait familiar in female comics since it is so often ingrained in them while surviving the bear-pit atmosphere of the club circuit. But it's too easy to put Porter's effusiveness down to that alone, partly because her shows seem to have more subject matter in them than they can actually handle, an occupational hazard for a quick mind.

While the words-per-minute rate is high, the gags-per-minute rate is less so, and some of Porter's best lines ("I'm a single woman in my thirties, so most of my friends are gay men and cats. Turns out most of them are attracted by the stench of gin and regret") are almost drowned by her continual contextualising.

Porter said herself, in a recent interview, that the hardest thing about writing the show was "putting the jokes in it", because it would have been easy for her just to "bang on about her love life". It's a telling admission. Luckily, it doesn't tell the whole story, as Porter is a good writer and her turn of phrase is worth holding out for; she nimbly sums up the British attitude to drinking with: "Do you fancy work after drinks? Nah, forget it, let's have a day off." Earlier she notes that many famous people have suffered from OCD, including footballers, but in that case the affliction manifests itself in them putting their teenage conquests in a certain order.

Meanwhile, the pint-sized Porter's obvious ability to carry off apocryphal stories as if they were actual events (eg how her spray tan caused a tramp to make a racist comment, which she then takes as justifying the money spent on it) is undermined by the unlikely story of a totally unsuitable internet date she went on with someone she clearly would have vetted beforehand. When she later describes the whole internet concept as "vile", it feels as if she's paying lip service to something, however unpalatable it may be, that she's not genuinely researched or not effectively dealt with.

Yet it's an equally unlikely story of a drunken date, where she is wearing a PVC nurse's uniform (a gift from the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, in which she appeared with Christian Slater), which seems to ring truest. Certainly, the bell tolls to signal a well-executed routine about an embarrassing message she needlessly leaves on her date's mobile phone. The anecdote closes the show and avoids any mawkishness that the subject might have engendered, though the choice of climax is apparently down to the reversion to her single status during the run of the show.

Though she says that the show is more for single people than couples, it is accessible, mixing the cute with the coquettish in an attempt to be Felicity Kendal-meets-Carrie Bradshaw. If it were a first date, you would have to give it a cautious chance of a second, and, for all her breathless prefacing, Porter continues her own affair as a hardy perennial of the comedy world.

Touring to 30 May ( www.chortle.co.uk)