Review by Steve Bennett

I broke a cardinal Fringe rule for this: Never watch a university-spawned sketch show where any of the performers unironically wears trouser braces over an white open-necked shirt. But The Pin – a trio of Cambridge Footlighters – proved themselves strong, if flawed, debutants on the Edinburgh stage.

Mark Fiddaman, Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden certainly carry a superior air of confidence on to the stage. But it’s not entirely unearned as their show has an ambitious structure, which they pull off, while proving themselves strong sketch actors in the traditional mould.

Their Pulp Fiction-like gimmick is that the show is not chronological. We start with a single dramatic incident, then leap around in time to see how we got here, and as the characters interact with others, we get their back stories too.

All well and good, and pretty darned stylish, though it seems a cheat when the action settle on an old man in his flat, reading, watching TV and listening to the radio – which allows genre parodies to be shoehorned into the rest of the narrative.

Also, not all the comedy is as good as the clever skeleton on which it hangs. A couple of sketches hang on quite thin ideas – the train line offering sexual favours to passengers stands out for the wrong reason – and they  are very dependent on the old switcheroo, when they suddenly reveal the person you thought was, say, the mafia boss, wasn’t, and it was the other guy instead. That’s the joy of having characters who all look the same and don’t have costumes or props – although it’s also credit to them that they create such a cast with so few accessories.

Yet there are some strong scenes here, too, the obsequious confidant of a romantic hero is a delight; the near-obligatory Shakespeare parody is expertly done, and a certain short-lived Nineties rock band gets what’s coming to it. Sometimes there’s nothing quite like a ridiculously petty target.

There’s enough here to suggest they could be a sharp as their name suggest, and once they’ve written through the easier gags, they could have the capability of something truly inventive.

Review date: 10 Aug 2012
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard