The Travelling Sisters | Review by Steve Bennett
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The Travelling Sisters

Note: This review is from 2016

Review by Steve Bennett

Damn, these girls got soul. Or funk. Whatever you call that indefinable alchemy that means their sheer presence exudes fun and sass.

That this Aussie trio are part-musical helps, but they are physical too – and verbal. They have all their bases covered. Their sketches are funny, but that’s primarily because THEY are funny. On paper, it can’t amount to anything like the joyful all-in-this-together silliness they exude in person.

The audience are the fourth member of the team. Tonight they needed little encouragement to join in, but the trio’s impish joie de vivre makes it hard not to anyway. They have an overriding sense of their team style, down to providing their own backing track and making the costume and scene changes funny – an attention to the small details without being completely straitjacketed by their plans.

Their cliche-free sketches are slightly surreal, but with the emphasis on the daft rather than the weird, and never play out quite how you expect. That includes a mulletted bunch of unlikely sportsmen, discussing their prowess and sharing anecdotes which breaking off into asides just like real-life conversations.

And if you’ve seen the old improv game whereby one player provides the arms for another, these three jack it up brilliantly, creating a memorable new character-driven twist.

We live out the tragic love story between hunchbacked pork-pie fanatic Coral and her beloved Colin (pronounced Co-lin) again going in unpredictable directions, daggy dancing takes on new joy, and the pretentiousness of ‘movement artists’ is sent up gleefully. They are Gaulier alumni, so might know the world they are mocking here, but wear their training lightly.

The Travelling Sisters – Ell Sachs, Laura Trenerry and Lucy Fox – snuck under the radar on last year’s Free Fringe, but if the festival is about seeking new talent, you could do worse than start at Pleasance That at 10.45pm.

Review date: 6 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard

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