It sounds like: ‘Wheeeeeeeee!’ says the multi-talented author of this amazing one-man show. If we were able to slow down the scream, he suggests, the meaning of the lobster’s message would be clear, and furthermore it would be obvious. Like much else in a frenetic hour’s maelstrom of ideas, it is treated to a multi-media treatment that frequently mystifies. In its mood and execution echoing Beckett, master of the serious message delivered as humour, the mixed genre presentation works surprisingly well within the constraints of a one-hour show. The intimate theatrical space of The Etcetera Theatre at the Oxford Arms pub in Camden beings a welcome intimacy to a performance which deserves a bigger audience and which would benefit from more elaborate theatrical resources.

The stage is bare, apart from a large white sheet of paper tacked to the back wall depicting twenty or so hexagonal outlines arranged in a flattened circle, a chair supporting an artists’ box of pastels to the left and a small table with a ukulele and case to the right. Tombs is a casually but neatly dressed twenty-something. By the end, the paper is covered in drawings to represent past, present and future and Tombs has acquired a number of red streaks across his shirt and down his cheeks, resembling blinded Gloucester in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’.

There’s nothing slow about Tomb’s thought-provoking account of the history of the universe, illustrated with oil-pastel drawings to represent the ‘loop’ of time, beginning with the ‘Big Bang’ and ending, at the climax, in an implosion that is a theatrical coup.

Punctuated with a number of witty lyrics to ukulele accompaniment, with a voice and delivery recalling a young Tom Lehrer, the one-hour performance has an end-of-pier frivolity which contrasts with its serious political comment. The opening number :‘First you get a car,/ Then you get house’ has overtones of Pete Seeger’s conformity-regretting ‘Little Boxes’ but the darker US-baiting ‘Nagasaki’, delivered with a teeth-baring savagery, mines a darker satirical vein, .

Some numbers have a disarming simplicity, as when Tombs encourages audience participation in a song about a boy riding a bicycle, under which is another bicycle, and so on ‘ad infinitum’. Their quirky humour recalls the nonsense rhymes of Edward Lear in their appeal to a sense of absurdity taken to logical conclusions. This is particularly clear when the mystery of the show’s title is revealed. Well, what would a lobster scream as it boiled? Of course: ‘Oh, it’s hot, hot, hot, / In this pot, pot, pot.’ It’s both a surprise and not a surprise, the lobster in its pot a metaphor for the human condition.

To the main question posed, ‘Why is there so much unhappiness in the world? Tombs supplies his typically nebulous response. The answer, apparently, lies in our being buried under a mountainous sludge of lies, represented by a black pyramid. Pictorially, it resembles the burial mound of the First Emperor of China over the familiar Michelangelo diagram of a man in circle. ‘The economy is a lie’ William disarmingly confides as like a more nimble Rolf Harris he covers his paper with drawings

The world has lost the security of early Shamanistic leaders; the final answer to its ills doesn't lie in the ‘techno-rapture’ of a future when the Internet takes final control, says Tombs. Salvation will come in greater mutual understanding between people. His final anthem in praise of the tongue, the organ of speech and communication, is a beautifully delivered summary.

In the build-up to the denouement, Tombs invites the audience to recreate the noise of a gigantic machine in motion. Unfortunately, the small gathering on the night I attended was unable to produce the intended dramatic impact, resulting only in a Heath Robinson rumble and creak effect. One could imagine with a full house, such as the Reduced Shakespeare Company commands for their interactive set-pieces, it would have brought the show to an impressive conclusion. Tombs final implosive gesture is as unexpectedly dramatic as all that has gone before.