Show Rating:

If this were a real workplace, some serious questions would be asked about productivity. In their 50-minute show, the three winsome young performs manage to generate virtually no laughs. By the end of it, the majority of the audience were slumped in their chairs, arms folded across their chests. Believe me, I counted. Well, there wasn’t much happening on stage worth paying attention to.

Their basic problem is they have no confidence in anyone making the leap of logic needed to get a joke. So everything is spelled out and over-explained, draining what little wit was in each scene and making them drone on long after we’ve worked out what the gag was. And it’s not as if anything was clever or unexpected in the first place.

The writing is most abysmal. A whole, unfunny sketch revolves around the fact the word ‘umpire’ sounds a bit like ‘vampire’; when two bees talk they painfully say things like ‘buzz off’ and ‘mind your own bees-wax’. I think there was supposed to be some irony in that last one, but it was impossible to know for sure.

Everything was so tediously predictable. Yet, presumably having watched TV sketch shows, the girls seemed to think that we’d like to see some of their tedious characters come back for second or third sketches with the same basic premise. If we didn’t laugh first time, it won’t sustain more.

Rachel Polsom, Elyse Marks and Caroline Chase perform with some confidence, but comedy doesn’t seem to come naturally to them. Their characters all have the voices of actresses in a sketch show, rather than actual, real people, or even exaggerated caricatures. I suspect stage-school training.

Still, they’re only young and perhaps don’t know any better. But for now these Working Girls just aren’t working hard enough.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett