Beta Males: The Train Job
Live Review

Ideas are packed into the Beta Males’ Train Job as tightly as commuters in rush hour. It’s vibrant mix of highbrow writing and lowbrow physical gags, with sparky dialogue and energetic performances driving the thrill-a-minute storyline forwards as powerfully and rapidly as the train on which it’s set. That would be the half-the-speed-of-sound Olympus, which can get from London to Edinburgh in just under an hour (convenient for Fringe timings, that).

The contained, compartmentalised environment of a train is clearly a perfect device for linking sketches, and the four Betas are following in the tracks of the Pajama Men in setting their multi-character, multi-stranded adventure on an inter-city express.

Passengers include money-obsessed City men, the illuminati, a group of hobos travelling in the boxcar, a gentleman thief and his terrible-at-banter policeman nemesis – while parodies of the likes of Brief Encounter and Titanic are also hurled into the furnace of invention that drives things forward. There’s even a silent sketch, flicking between blackout and visible action as the train supposedly whips through tunnels, that wouldn’t be out of place in a Benny Hill show – from the early days when his inventiveness was still intact.

The main strand, though, is the typical disaster-movie plot, in which an ambitious transport magnate, in this case John Henry Falle’s Evelyn Sands, has created an impressive piece of technology, but cut corners on safety. Will such a slipshod attitude lean to catastrophe, or will one man save the day?

On board are Transport Secretaries past and present Philip Hammond (Richard Soames) and Stephen Byers (Jon Gracey), now languishing in disgrace after a series of scandals. The way the quartet weave the real-life corruption and personal behaviour of the former MP for North Tyneside into the plot, with both playfulness and scanty-but-truthful research, is one of the many delights of this cracking hour.

There are plenty of zinging lines, often knowingly overplayed – such as the brilliant sketch in which the town of Berwick-on-Tweed hubristically celebrates its lack of rail disasters just as The Olympus hurtles through. But most of the fun – of which there is lashings – comes from the exuberant physicality of the four, whether they’re clambering through the audience or spraying water from their mouths in disbelief, almost always in the direction of poor fall guy Guy Kelly.

This is an impressive, slick and hilarious show from the Betas, who are fast establishing themselves as one of the best sketch teams on the Fringe.