Review by Steve Bennett

Site-specific events are always a welcome addition to comedy festivals; and hotels have proved a particular favourite in which to set them. Mark Watson even established an entire building as a mock – and rather surreal – hotel at the 2009 Edinburgh Fringe.

As it happens, Watson has also directed Kate McLennan and Wes Snelling in Standard Double, which takes place in the confines of just one room. It’s certainly intimate, with around 30 seats crammed in but, perhaps surprisingly, there’s little awkwardness about this situation.

The show, it turns out, is a fairly standard sketch offering, with McLennan and Snelling performing an array discrete characters who pass through the room: including endearingly daffy housekeeping staff, a lonely businessman calling on a prostitute’s services, and a couple who’s anniversary away seems doomed by the bloke’s desire to hang out with his best mate.

Laughs ebb and flow. Sometimes deliberately – there’s one particularly poignant moment – and sometimes because a scene doesn’t quite sparkle. But their performances are excellent, conjuring up diverse, credible cast of staff and guests with no props or costume to help them. Snelling, in particular, has an added gift for the physical, getting a laugh from just a shuffle.

The setting is inspired. A hotel room sees all manner of humanity, from single men enjoying secure anonymity, to friends with cause for celebration, to couples crammed together in a claustrophobic room symbolic of their relationship – and all are explored here.

Highlights includes the recurring character of McLennan’s intense, irritating, new operations manager, all buzzwords and no common sense, bulling her put-upon staff and the elderly couple bickering with viciously pointed passive-aggression. There’s probably a whole sitcom in their spite-fuelled relationship.

McLennan and Snelling’s own performance relationship is a lot more sound, and they have a chemistry, an energy and a natural, believable, style that makes this show bounce along.

And the audience even get to sneak out with some toiletries...

Review date: 18 Apr 2013
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival