Janelle Koening and Vanessa Bennett certainly know their comedy trends. Mix one part workplace tedium to one part girly self-obsessed double act, and Call Girls is the bastard child of The Office and Kath and Kim that you end up with.

The K&K influence is by far the strongest in this tale of two call centre wage slaves – especially noticeable in Koening’s lazy, whiney suburbanite fretting, but never acting, about diets, relationships and the unfair hand she feels life has dealt her.

Between marketing calls she and her more level-headed colleague bitch about co-workers, consult their horoscopes and have plenty of those ‘why won’t he phone…?’ conversations after ill-fated dates.

The show is pretty much a collection of sketches sharing a location and characters, with only the slightest of nods to a narrative that would make it the ‘comic play’ it professes to be. The characters, too, wobble unsteadily between the real people you’d expect to see in a piece of theatre and the flat caricatures that so often dog sketch shows – and in doing so expose Koening’s limited acting range.

Writing quality’s equally mixed, with several very pedestrian scenes, especially towards the start of the show. Yet after a while, the duo hit their stride - and demonstrate they’re more than capable of producing the funnies.

Their best sketches offer more subtlety and layers, with funny asides and well-observed mannerisms woven into the script. A boredom-busting game in which the girls dare each other to adopt exaggerated foreign accents in their calls injects some silliness into the hour (although the joke is repeated once too often), while the one-sided cold-calls, heard only from the marketeer’s point of view, also provide winning comic moments. If this consistency could be maintained, they’d have a strong show on their hands.

At 6pm, this is one of the earliest shows in the festival day, and serves its purpose as an appetiser to the comedy ahead –inoffensive and enjoyable, yet not too rich in laughs it’ll spoil your appetite.

Reviewed by Steve Bennett
Melbourne, April 2006