Review by Jay Richardson

A succession of lively, recurring sketches, A Kick In The Teeth doesn’t always deliver on the promise of its high-concept set-ups. But there’s ambition, commitment and verve in the approach of this six-strong troupe.

Led by principal writer James Hamilton, they interweave five narratives, each underscored with the casual threat of violence. A murderous supercomputer defeats all-comers at Battleships; The Poppyman, a bogeyman-style charity mugger insists on the commemoration of Armistice Day or else;  a hard-boiled, New York detective, so preoccupied with performing his morning routine and self-narrating that the body count piles up; tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists, resisting alien invasion from their suburban shed; and The Obseletium, a museum of old-fashioned and useless technology, run by a dufferish luddite with a turnkey for a pacemaker.

This last is the most subtle and satisfying, evoking a Gilliam-esque world of obsessive quixotism, resisting technology’s onward march with a King Canute level of delusion and not a little pathos. The Poppyman is good value too, expanding nicely on societal pressure to conform to this worthy memorial, the psychotic intensity of the character undercut by glimpses of his domestic situation.

Tracing an archetypal blueprint of son-avenging father, the Battleships’ denouement falls a bit flat after some enjoyable macho grandstanding, while the conspiracists are well served by a topsy-turvy logic that finds danger and double-think in everything. Indeed, the only piece that doesn’t really work is the cop storyline, which trades on the same joke for way too long, game-playing serial killers arriving too late on the scene to save it from becoming rote.

The humour tends to derive from some strong characterisation and the gag-rate could be punchier. But the performances are of a generally high quality and there’s a neat offshoot from the supercomputer storyline, with a human keyboardist version of the computer game Guitar Hero affording atmospheric backing to all of the threads. Struggling to woo a lady in the audience, the doomed sincerity of the gesture nicely offsets the sketches’ exuberant menace.

Review date: 26 Aug 2012
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Just The Tonic at The Caves