Review by Steve Bennett

Pelican make it easy for you to dislike them with their theatre-studenty approach to the sketch show.

Quite a few skits from this slighty-too-smug four-man troupe seem to be little more drama exercises in physically ‘being’ something else: Look I’m pretending to be a fairground claw game! Now we’re hatchlings! And what’s this? My, it’s a box of ‘mime’, let’s open it up! There’s even juggling, guys.

And then there is what they do at the end of every sketch, which is to go…

‘Ooooh…. aaaah’

…in unison, like a vocal warm-up. When they’re doing this, the word ‘tossers’ springs readily to mind.

But behind this ponciness are some quite good ideas; even if there are not as quite as many as you’d hope to fill the hour.

At their best, the quartet – actually Cambridge Footlighters Sam Grabiner Theo Wethered, Guy Emmanuel and Jordan Mitchell, rather than drama students – produce an off-kilter idea which they dispatch with efficiency and originality. And even some straightforward ideas, such as the squeamish surgeons, or even that mime sketch open up into something more interesting and funnier. They and pull off a good quickie with a Bop It machine, and sign of with a pacy ‘scenes that didn’t make the cut’ that piles a few last-minute gags into the show

‘Ooooh…. aaaah’

Yet they also pad out some quite simple bits of wordplay into sketches which they present proudly, as if strokes of genius. Case in point: an over-long, pun-laden sketch about Jesus and the Beatles which starts weak and deteriorates rapidly, or a scene which takes ‘roses for the lady…’ literally. Even the shamanic ritual at the end, an excuse for a big set-piece finale, seems forced, with a arbitrary conflict as its pivot.

As performers, they are a bit more personable than their affectations suggest, and do at least acknowledge their privilege. But the main things that give Pelican a personality difference over other similar offerings from other similar middle-class white boys are the very things that irritate.

There’s enough to suggest a comedic future, but they’ll have to work on their distinctiveness before they become anyone’s favourite sketch troupe.

‘Ooooh…. aaaah’

Review date: 12 Aug 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Just The Tonic at The Caves