Show Rating:

Watson and Oliver are clearly a class act: talented actresses, deft physical comedians and able to do what so many sketch shows struggle with – create a distinctive atmosphere that permeates the show.

There’s always a slight discomfort to their scenes, undercurrents of awkwardness in the things that go unsaid, even, perhaps, a frisson of sexual tension between the two, no matter what gender their characters.

It’s a production that politely whispers ‘quality’ in all it does, right down to the strict adherence to a red-and-black colour scheme to give a subtle visual coherence. But for all the duo’s performance abilities and attention to the smallest detail, the results are still hit-and-miss. The show is always impressive, but only flittingly hilarious.

It is however, funnier than last year’s debut – which is always encouraging – and best scenes are very good indeed. Just two characters have been brought back from the last offering – an Edwardian gentleman suitor and the blind, and now paralysed, object of his formal, stilted advances – and they are as brilliant as before.

As in most of their best work, the ideas are gloriously silly, bad taste even, but the delivery deadpan, making the gags are all the funnier for being underplayed.

Another fine sketch perfectly captures the unnatural bonhomie and unfunny in-jokes that develops as a social shorthand between office colleagues. Although what seems, at first, to be a run-of-the-mill corporate leaving do, soon transpires to be the Last Supper. Equally finely observed, and in a similar vein, is an appraisal – or possibly Apprentice spoof – set inside a beehive. Inspired.

Not all the scenes have this brilliance, mind, and too often settle for run-of-the-mill, and often overstay their welcome. But while these moments can only be disappointing, there’s still something about Lorna Watson and Ingrid Oliver that suggests they’re on the verge of something rather special, and inching ever closer towards it.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett