Comedy is having a confessional moment. True stories are tumbling from the lips of comics all over town and it is not a bad thing.

“Everything I am going to tell you on stage is true,” says Mandy Knight, who has decided to tell the story behind her dark sense of humour.

Like a lot of humourists Knight learned to joke to deflect some pretty grim circumstances in early life.

She begins with some fairly standard club comic banter – before suddenly changing pace and taking us to the heart of an abortion clinic. 

It’s a switch, which disturbs a group of idiotic loud drunk men at the front – making them so uncomfortable they have to come up with an audible plan for how to leave the room. “We’re trapped,” says one of them loudly – as soon as the uncomfortable truths start coming.

Eventually the drunk men work out an escape route and the rest of the room breathes a sigh of relief.  Knight acknowledges their exit elegantly, but doesn’t let it take her off her stride.   She has things she wants to reveal.

And it is quite a story. As a child she wasn’t properly fed and she didn’t have a stable home.  She was so neglected and uncared for she never had a birthday party.

Knight is happily married now and thought she had dealt with her past – but a trip to India makes her realise she has unfinished business. 

Encouraged by an Indian swami, Knight looks for a way to travel back into the heart of her childhood and discover why she was abandoned by those people whose job it was to look after her and make her feel safe.

It’s a moving story of acceptance, forgiveness and healing and Knight tells it well, bringing a tear to the eye of many members of the audience.

What she hasn’t really done is find a way to integrate her chippy,  ‘I say what I think’, comedy persona with the storytelling sections. 

When Knight talks about how she handles her husband by pretending to be a Southern Belle, or about how annoying she finds her mother in law, it’s funny but it is like something from a different show.

The best bits of Dark Knight are when she tells the story of what happened to her as a child. When Knight goes back into those days she physically changes on stage, turning from a stylish middle class woman to a tiny frightened child.

She’s survived partly by finding a way to laugh and joke about this stuff but it clearly still hurts. It’s very special and really quite an honour, to see this frightened little girl brought out into the open and put under the spotlight for the first time.