Dog-Eared Collective: Dogs On Show at the 2011 Brighton Fringe
Live Review

Comedy quartet The Dog-Eared Collective are all over the place… and not necessarily in a good way.

Their latest collection of sketches includes a couple of lovely scenes, but plenty more that long outstay their welcome, performed with a drab deadpan that pales next to the energy of their best pieces. They’ve certainly moved on since the shrieky surrealism and dressing-up box characterisation that blighted their earliest shows, but they’ve not yet found that elusive but vital consistency.

The highlights first. A scrunched-down sample of what Snooker: The Musical might look like is a delight, witty and upbeat, while the image of an Italian Stig road-testing a gondolier in an export version of Top Gear is wonderfully silly. And the finale, parodying Hollywood movies cackhandedly targeting the youth by combining basketball and street dancing, is both silly and clever, employing a well-judged piece of non-threatening audience participation and featuring the best of many examples of inventive low-budget prop creation by the Collective.

One level down are a couple of imperfect but promising ideas, including the opening sketch in which a couple squabble while filming a pretentious fragrance ad and a pint-sized superhero, performed with spark and vigour. But in both these cases, the writing isn’t crisp enough, garbling the thread and intent of the scenes. Some more intense script editing is definitely needed.

And in the weaker skits, which narrowly outnumber the rest,, those flaws are overpowering. A decent, recurring, scene of an awards show for animals needs beefing up from the promising initial idea; but both the dour St John Ambulancemen, with their confusing banter and the dreary Warwickshire ramblers have almost no redeeming features. Likewise, the concept of a wake planner could have legs, but this is neither done with enough extravagant bad taste nor sharp gags to come off.

There’s plenty of evidence that the four can be engaging performers, when they apply themselves, and while there’s a great 20 minutes in here, a fully entertaining hour is still out of their reach.