Mugging Chickens - Fringe 2009
Live Review

Oh Christ, this feels like taking a baseball bat to a bunch of blinking puppies, but there is very little to redeem this sketch show.

Much of it seems to serve the purpose of amusing themselves - there are plenty of gags about one member of the troupe turning homoerotic on another - you can’t imagine what it must be like in their festival flat with this amount of testosterone running through their systems.

They open with two of the troupe singing a not bad, but rather familiar ,song about being best friends, as the song progresses one of the duo makes it quite clear that by friendship he means actually means gay sex. But from then on in, most of the sketches fall flat. One of which, a scene played between the master of the house and his ‘Jeeves,’ is a (poor) copy of the Ted and Ralph relationship in the Fast Show.

Interspersed there are a couple of interesting ideas - the news that reports 24 hours a day even when there’s no actual news and a party nuisance for hire. But there are far too many skits that seem to have forgotten their punchline: a reverse strip tease appears to be an excuse for two of them to prance around in their underpants; a children’s author pitches inappropriate ideas to his publisher; and two salesmen try to flog a new energy drink named Pussy – cue bad and unsubtle innuendo.

Nor is their execution of the show particularly slick, a few times one of the players has to prompt the sound man to remind him there should be music playing, and two of the actors appear as if Mogadon was slipped into their pre-show pint.

The only saving grace is that the youthful lot look like they’re having a whale of a time putting on the show - and providing they don’t read their reviews and choose to ignore the muted responses of many of their audience members, they’ll continue to enjoy it.

But if they plan to return to the festival they’re going to have do their research, write some decent stuff and get some acting tuition.