Intimate Strangers: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Just The Tonic at The Caves

Curate’s egg this one.  Some competent performers, some sharp production values, slick video inserts and sound.  That’s the end of the good news.

This is an example of what gives sketch bad name, which is a pity because there was some performance talent on the stage.  From a promising news broadcast start, it slid downhill.  A bunch of young performers raided the dressing-up box and seemed to be having considerably more fun than the audience.

There was a faintly offensive caricature of a mittel-European/German/Dutch gay, woman-hating producer fawning on his young cast who popped up a couple of times, reminiscent of a Kenny Everett creation for its low comedy broadness; a repetitive sketch about two old ladies yapping in the cinema which owed more than a bit to Python Terry Jones’s old bats. These were reprised later for a truly diabolically awful care home rap that I thought was going to suddenly become good to  take us by surprise. It didn’t.

There were some higher than low points: the Cluedo weekend party was executed with panache, a sketch involving bees looked good, a cooking programme with an increasingly drunk chef, whilst not a sparklingly original idea was had a real sense of fun.

Some of the filmed mini character sketches transcended the amateurish live action, they were short, less obvious and sometimes disconcertingly odd.  They achieved a big finale with a modest musical based on Scientology and its most famous advocates, the ensemble work was creditable,  but the overall effect  was just  cringeworthy.

The wee girl in this show should run away and distance herself from this farrago, she can clearly act and dance and has comic timing, but it would be unfair to expect her to carry the dead weight of so much unoriginal writing and some bloody awful mugging from other cast members.