Review by Steve Bennett

As a character actor, Lucie Pohl totally inhabits her creations, defined by subtleties of pose and physicality. Some are broad brush strokes of caricature, admittedly, and they are all given different nationalities, as is de rigueur for any actress wanting to show off the ‘accents’ section of her CV, but the best of them are as convincing as real-life people.

There’s only problem for a show billed as comedy and with an irreverent, irrelevant title: it only has a nodding acquaintance with funny. And even then, the rare flashes of wit very rarely come off.

Her stand-out character is the panhandler philosopher, dispensing street wisdom on a New York corner while rattling his coffee cup for spare quarters. His bookend scenes make mesmerising viewing, but laughs are sparse.

Sometimes the characters are just sad. The broke, depressed wannabe actress desperate for the fame – and thinness – she assumes will bring her happiness has shades of Maria Bamford in her execution, but the situation’s just bleak. Real bleak, not comic bleak. And likewise traces of the black comedy behind the redneck murderer are faintly visible, but the portrayal is just too unsettlingly real.

Broader attempts at comedy fall into the crass. Breaking the show’s usual tone of authenticity, the Italian lothario speed dater has all the nuance and cultural sensitivities of an Allo Allo character as proclaims: ‘I have-a the ’erpes!’

There’s a whiney, privileged, like, millennial, yeah? With her, like OMGs, selfies and rising inflections? Who speaks in, like, hashtags? That we’ve seen, like, soooo many times before? #cliche. And please spare us from yet another comedy life coach. There are surely more spoof practitioners now than real ones.

Only a couple of her scenes seem like comedy sketches: the status-focussed financial professional wanting to see an ROI on her underperforming six-year-old son functions as a solid skit and acts as a rare showcase of Pohl’s comic abilities, not just her thespian ones. And playing Vladimir Putin’s sperm is a wonderfully inventive idea with a funny, surreal visual – but the writing doesn’t do justice to the idea.

Pohl ought to get a lot more castings out of this, given how assuredly it shows off her dramatic credentials. But we’re left in the dark about her comedic ones.

Review date: 8 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Gilded Balloon Teviot