Review by Steve Bennett

Carolina Giammetta and Charlotte Palmer are subtle, engaging actors, who have created a menagerie of slightly strange characters. But for most of them they haven’t written enough good jokes, hoping, wrongly, that the eccentricity alone will carry the sketches.

The show has an episodic set-up; the premise being that a Brownie troupe’s Brown Owl is having a reunion of all the girls who attended her wedding 25 years ago to see what they’re up to now. It’s transparent that this is a fairly arbitrary structure for disparate character pieces, but it does provide a convenient motif, including a recurring brown-and-yellow colour scheme.

A lot of thought has clearly gone into such touches, including the 25-year-old music that bookends the sketches, while the atmosphere of a slightly shifted reality is nicely achieved, thanks to director Gareth Corke, who also plays any token males the sketches require. But on the downside, he sets the pace too slow, and there are too few laughs.

Highlights include bonkers airport information clerk who provides some out-and-out stupidity, and the passive-aggressive nanny and mother, arguing unsubtly through falsely jolly conversations with the baby, a scenario which seems all-too real.

But this is far outnumbered by the duds. A lot of scenes rely on deliberately awkward movements for their humour, such as the lazy fitness instructor, which is pure energy over content. And a couple of other nice ideas – the judge who’s judgmental over much more than the law, and the competitive careers officer – don’t extend much beyond the original thought.

These are clearly three good actors, but they’re in need of more help with the script, someone to punch up their decent concepts with actual gags.

Reviewed by: Steve Bennett

Review date: 1 Jan 2008
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett