Review of a new live sketch troupe

The biggest challenge for a sketch group is to define their personality, which is something Knocked Conscious struggle with. They are tight performers but the writing is inconsistent in quality and – more crucially – style, which does little to distinguish themselves from other middle-class quartets.

A few skits follow the simple formula of depicting someone doing their job in an inappropriate way or pullbacks to reveal the sketch wasn’t happening where you thought it was. ’Backstage’ interludes have echoes of Mitchell & Webb’s writers’ room scenes, but aren’t nearly as inventive.

Sometimes they take a simple observation – such as the creepy behaviour in Love Actually – and act it out in rather a simple manner. And considering dick pics in a less technological age is pretty hack stand-up, no matter how nicely they perform it out as a sketch.

Each scene ends in a snippet of a track related to its topic… a nice device but also something of a get-out-of-punchline free card. Why write a payoff when you can just stop abruptly and be bailed out by an audio cue?

Yet they do show some imagination too. The background to that famous photograph of construction workers working on the Empire State Building is a nicely offbeat premise, and there’s an adorably naive silliness to their Bond sketch 

But a couple of sketches delve into bad taste - but hitting familiar touchstones and with no suggestion they really have a love of sick jokes, just that they’re going through the motions. 

A parody of the Gamble Aware ad is dark in a more inventive way, while the morgue scene indulges their sillier instincts instead.

There’s a single song parody: an acoustic take on I Took A Pill In Ibiza, but from the point of view of someone struggling with the cost of living in London. Again, it feels adrift – unsure whether music should be part of the act or not.

The strongest scenes have something extra going on. For example, an affectionate David Beckham parody adds an extra level by having the England ace ordering a Subway as the main joke unfolds

To their credit, Gayaneh Lara, Calum Maclean, Mungo Russell and Durham Revue alumnus Henrie Allen rattle though the material and no scene lasts more than a minute or two. That’s something of a necessity, as many skits are just one simple idea – and some are barely that – but at least they are aware of the fact.  

And a four-way scene involving fast-paced, cross-talking nonsense shows the precise engineering they can bring to their work. 

To be fair this is still a new outfit. They had a short run at the Drayton Arms fringe theatre last December before this short run at Waterloo East – and outside of the Edinburgh Fringe  there are much fewer outlets for sketch performers to hone their craft than for stand-ups. Which is probably what they need - more gig hours to work out what the USP will be, as they surely have the chops to execute it once they’ve figured that out.

• Knocked Conscious's four-night run at Waterloo East Theatre ended last night.

Review date: 7 Dec 2025
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Waterloo East Theatre