Review by Steve Bennett

To say Ben Willbond creates some wonderful comic characters is to call Rembrandt  a bit of a doodler. These are no mere throwaway creations built to service a joke but real, credible – even if bizarrely extreme - people who, in just a few brief minutes, you come to know intimately.

Each of them is so detailed and nuanced in their depiction, with subtle quirks in words and deed that not only flesh them out, but also provide the hook for an embarrassment of precious comedy gems.

The trick is that they are very funny characters, either intrinsically, by the fact that they are instantly recognisible or both. Willbond doesn’t have to mug or exaggerate to get the laughs, instead they emerge so, so naturally from his sublime performance.

It’s not just him, either. If you look very closely at the poster you might be able to spot Katy Brand and Jim Field Smith’s names. Yet their fine contributions are cruical. All three names ought to be writ large in lights.

The two supporting actors play a couple who are house-hunting even though he, unknown to her, has just been sacked. That, admittedly, does not sound like much of a premise for a riot of laughter, but it is.

Willbond plays a succession of people around them; although the exact link is often obscured until a revelatory moment at the end of each sketch, slowly building layers onto the structure of the show. Add that to the complexity offered by these well conceived, well realised characters and you’ve got the basis for a full-blown comedy-drama which doesn’t ignore the word before the hyphen.

It’s hard to do justice to such superb work by simply describing the characters, as they joy is how wonderfully they are portrayed and the minor details that make them real. A cockney wideboy giving a seminar in being a hitman, the painfully shy space scientist nervously laughing at his own jokes or a weird, sinister estate agent who will do anything for a sale – they all sound like decent ideas, but that is not what distinguishes them.

My personal favourites – and it’s a tough call - were the emotionally repressed middle class, middle aged couple, barely disguising their gnawing misery, hatred and unpleasantness under a flimsy veil of jolly blather and aloof insouciance.

For all his brilliance, Willbond does not come across in the least bit actorly. There’s the occasional ad lib and he flirts with the audience, letting us in on the conceit with a nod and a wink by, for example getting an Irish-accented character who sounds remarkably similar to Dara O’Briain  to say the word ‘film’ a lot, just to roll around that extra vowel the Irish always insert. Like so many instances in this thoroughly impressive show, it could have been overdone; but the gag is pitched perfectly.

By the time this all-too-brief hour is over, we’ve come to know and care for these   characters, which a neat, almost emotional conclusion exploits to the full, providing the  icing on the cake of this show that never once falls short of dazzling. Masterly stuff.

Review date: 1 Jan 2005
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett