Brighton Fringe review by Steve Bennett

Given a situation and a crucial object from audience suggestions, Degrees Of Error improvise a long-form murder-mystery in that classic country house, Cluedo style. The board game influence even extends to the characters, named after and dressed in their given colour, providing the production with a strong visual style.

Tonight’s setting – a debutantes’ ball at a posh finishing school – added to that vintage feeling, with virtually all the players adopting the appropriate plummy-mouthed poshness, from the prim and perfect head girl to the professorial headmaster.

All are off-the-peg archetypes, understandable given how quickly their characters must be adopted, and the team slip into them easily. The set-up is largely coherent, too, although as extra elements are added to the loose plot the internal logic of the situation starts to bend, and you’d better not look too closely for inconsistencies.

They team are weaker, though, at comedy, with most of the jokes coming from their struggles when presented with a new challenge, or even when trying to remember each other’s character names. The detective, Sebastian Green (Peter Baker) is an offstage narrator but his injections are frequently ignored, or clumsily grappled with. 

He comments that the besotted White (Stephen Clements) is always getting the wrong end of the stick, for example, but the clear suggestion about the way this character should be played is never followed up. When he asks for a school song, the best they can improvise is: ‘Welcome to our school. How’s about it?’  Of course it’s funny because it’s so weak - but there are only so many times you can play that trick.

Actually the performer who came up with that ditty, Elizabeth Skrzypiec, seems the most comically gifted – although that could be because her early character choice gave her more options. Her choirmistress was actually a brassy cockney broad, a rough diamond among the hoity-toity others, and she played a blinder with her exaggerated gor-blimeyness. 

Some easy goals were missed. The case ended up resting on whether a glove fitted, yet the chance for even a single sly OJ joke wasn’t seized. You night say that was a smart choice to avoid the obvious – had the the pun about the victim being ‘finished’ at a finishing school not been given several run-outs.

Yet despite not being quick-witted enough to get the most out of the gags, the Bristol-based team have a lot of communicable fun with the ludicrous situations and showboating performances. They inhabit their overblown characters with a farcical conviction that keeps this potboiler solidly entertaining, even if it’s not a killer show.

Review date: 11 May 2016
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett