Show Rating:

How do you negotiate the maze of sketch shows on the Fringe? While many have themes that might give you an idea to their content, many more have no other angle than a group of people trying to be funny.

Cowards are four such young, middle-class men, their only hook being that one of them, Tim Key, is the deadpan sidekick from Alex Horne’s acclaimed shows. That and they wear matching shirts.

But how they do distinguish themselves is with often inventive material, skilfully performed, with a keen eye for how people genuinely talk and act – a world away from the stagey manner so often seen this genre.

Some of the best moments come from the sharp observation of the awkward or exaggerated bonhomie that people with only the shallowest or most casual of friendships affect to dodgesocial embarrassment.

It’s by highlighting characters and characteristics you instantly recognise that these scenes have their edge. But the show is not always so grounded in reality, and there are plenty of surreal quickies and non-sequiteurs too, which don’t quite hit home so well.

The enthusiastic quartet are inventive in the staging, too, playing around with the idea that up isn’t necessarily up – and so genuinely giving the audience, literally, a new perspective on things.

In the final tally, there are four or five scenes here of pure brilliance – including a splendid Steve Redgrave conversation – but probably just as many that are just baffling, rather than funny.

For a troupe that enjoy mixing the sublime and the ridiculous; understatement and overstatement, such contradictions in their own material might be expected. But they could do with more consistency in both style and quality – and if they can sustain the best 15 minutes of this into a full show, it would be unbeatable.