Twins - A Split Bill @ Brighton Fringe

Standing on a stage beside the person who shares your DNA and saying look how differently we turned out is the animating logic behind Twins – A Split Bill, the joint venture from brothers Chris and Matthew Ali.

The billing promises two individual sets followed by a double-act section, and the first half delivers; both men working their own material with genuine assurance. They grew up together in a tough part of London, in a single-parent household, and that shared biographical raw material becomes a kind of dramatic irony: identical origins, divergent lives. Chris is straight. Matthew is gay. The same womb, the same table, the same streets, but two distinct and fully-formed comic sensibilities.

What is perhaps unintentionally revealing is that Chris mines considerably more material from having a gay twin than Matthew extracts from having a straight one. There's something there: the queer experience rendered, as the more generative disruption, the thing that requires explanation and narration. Matthew, to his credit, is working in a different register entirely, his own set is warm, confident, and self-possessed, the voice of someone who has long since made peace with his story and is simply having a good time telling it.

A football joke sailed cleanly over the heads of everyone in the room, met with a silence that was, in its own way, funnier than a punchline. These moments of accidental comedy are fringe gold.

The show ventures into deeper water when it addresses the twins' experience of racism; specifically an incident in Venice, on holiday with their mum where, as they tell it, their Blackness became the reason they're refused a restaurant reservation, only for Matthew's gayness to somehow trump it in the hierarchy of otherness. It is the kind of anecdote that captures the lived absurdity of intersecting identities with more precision than most academic frameworks manage, and it lands with the specificity of something that could only have happened to these two particular people.

The promised double-act, however, proves to be something rather different from what the billing implies. Rather than scripted interplay, the twins invited audience members to submit questions on slips of paper, which they then drew at random and answered together, a format that, is catnip for a Fringe crowd, and they play it with easy charm with the foot on the roasting pedal.

Both men are genuinely funny, individually and at ease. As an exercise in mapping intersections, queerness, Blackness, brotherhood, class, identity - Twins is a fascinating and often delightful hour. What it is still becoming is a show in which the twin conceit does more structural and thematic work: the connective tissue between the two halves, the sense that the whole is consciously greater than its parts, is still being written. Both nights sold out, which suggests the audience already senses what this show might grow into.

Worth watching now. Worth watching again when they've found the seam that runs between them.

Twins @ The Southern Belle , Brighton Fringe for full show details.