Fever'd Imaginings of...Love The Concept - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Love the concept? I’m not entirely convinced there was a concept. This sketch show is billed as ‘a comedy buffet’ but this must be the finest example of comedy anorexia I have seen. Either that or it is a cleverly directed piece of subversive theatre designed to overthrow format with its vapidness.

It’s not even interesting enough to be bad, it is just incredibly boring. There is the usual sketch show format of several characters reappearing throughout, but the only consistency came from the pre-recorded sketches which left the stage empty and gave the audience a chance to shrug at each other with confusion and boredom.

The recurring characters included an inept school dinner lady who returns as a Michelin-starred chef moments later. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, absurdity and surrealism is another but a halfway house between the two with no rhyme, reason or abstract explanation is never going to satisfy.

Every sketch ended with an awkward silence while the performers waited for applause or a laugh that never came and the audience waited for some kind of punchline or payoff that was as equally and consistently absent.

The characters are one-dimensional and uninteresting, the scenarios are contrived and ridiculous and there is just no sign of where the writers thought the laughter would appear. A circus performer who encourages people to lick an eye on his stomach, a professor who freezes in time, a jazz singer who likes jazz mags – you see where this will lead – but not one single character has any reward for sitting though the endless drone of words that deliver nothing and lead nowhere.