Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

The bawdy boys of Wizard Sandwiches smash through their sketches with imprecise exuberance, dicking around with great spirit but little focus.

Their hour has the feel of a student revue, full of in-jokes brewed up in their all-male share house. They don’t really care if the audience gets them or not because they are having such larks with their mates.

One brilliantly off-the-wall scene aside – involving an astronaut in unusual trouble – the script is woefully underwritten. Ideas are either old (what if someone brought some modern tat to the Antiques Roadshow?, a thin parody of the vacuous speculation on 24-hour news) or sub-Python surreal (the olde-world pirate compelled to drill through his ship’s hull). The hope is that the loud, boisterous performances will power them through… and it does, indeed, work for a while. However it’s not long until the fragility of the writing is exposed.

Drew Belsten, Jarryd Clifford, Dylan Cole, Stuart Daulman and Jake Ludowyke manhandle each other, adopt some exaggerated accent or other, or make each other laugh with ad-libbed remarks which may or may not stem from the fact they’ve forgotten what they are supposed to say. All this makes the show seem increasingly indulgent, the tone ever-more pleased with itself, and with ever-less reason.

It comes as something of a surprise that this quintet – who all wear matching T-shirts emblazoned with eight-bit wizards – have been around for seven years as Lettuce Play seems a triumph of laddish enthusiasm over experience. Over that time they have clearly built up something of a fan base, as some in the audience adore every minute, and they won a People’s Choice at the Melbourne Fringe a couple of years back. But this show seems like so much empty noise.

Review date: 6 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival