Totally Tom: Fringe 2012
Live Review
Underbelly Cowgate

I have never seen Totally Tom before and found the show good, silly fun. I’m not sure that they totally lived up the hype they’ve received in the last year, but it was not completely undeserved on the evidence of this show.  Certainly at least half the audience were boys who look and sound just like them, but a couple of years younger, so they’re obviously inspiring a generation.

They played very well as a double act, big blond Tom Stourton, an easy natural clown and delicate, dark Tom Palmer, more restrained, but they didn’t fall into the cliché of straight man/ funny man but divided the humour honours equally.

They started energetically, with a sketch about a pair of self-righteous journalists barking would be challenging questions at the Met and reinforcing each other’s status so long as they were both thinking along the same lines.  One of the journos is not what he seems and from that springs a framing device for their story of men in a prison, a simple, good-natured murderer and his saviour, a wrongfully imprisoned genius.

Within the structure of the prison they played with the genre of prison drama – the talent show, the workout in the yard, the gang rivalry, the unlikely friendships and alliances, but chucked in some utterly off-the-wall digressions with a Dragon Tattoo reference, repeated threats of a poi demonstration (I had to google that later. God I feel old.) and a Leader Of The Pack-style mimed interlude.  What I found utterly charming about these boys was the surprising tenderness they showed, there was no brutal sending up of friendships or rugger-bugger homophobia that is  sometimes found  in male sketch groups. This robust, dense with ideas and laughs and not too slick for its own good.

They’ve certainly have the whole package, they look good, they handle physical comedy well and writing is strong and ideas are sustained and there’s never a gap on the tiny stage for the whole hour.