Review by Paul Fleckney

Oh, Daphne. So many tricks up their sleeve! Other sketch groups will be going green when they see this. The second show by Phil Wang, Jason Forbes and George Fouracres is a doozy, with so many winning sketches it’s almost – almost – a clean sweep.

The range of styles and tones is such that the show’s feet barely touch the ground. They play with words and language, there’s some old-fashioned slapstick, there’s total outright silliness, some postmodern self-referential humour a la The Pin, sometimes they take the bring the energy right down for a completely sober conversation that you know will be worth the wait. Oh and they are effectively a three-man choir, too.

There’s a nice fluidity to it all, too – one sketch starts off continuing a running joke about the evil of wasps, only to be interrupted by a semantic debate about napkins. Another extravagantly 'old-fashioned' sketch set in a bakery morphs into a dark portrayal of a man coming up on crack cocaine.

Underneath it all are (mostly) original ideas, good writing and brilliant performances. As with their debut, which was nominated for Best Newcomer last year, their complementary styles and skillsets play their part. Forbes is the slick, nimble one; Wang the slow-burner; Fouracres the engine. And unusually for sketch: no smugness.

The stand-out for me was their take-off of Frasier – an amusingly uncontemporaneous reference – which I’m chortling away about as I write. The accuracy of Forbes and Wang as Niles and Frasier themselves is funny to start with, then Fouracres enters as a grotesque version of Daphne.

Presumably it’s a take-off of how Americans view Daphne and how her character plays up to it, with Fouracres spinning it out into some quite lengthy monologues, growing ever more deranged. He again put me in the mind of a male Julie Walters.

This has to go down as one of the best sketch shows at the Fringe in years.

Review date: 12 Aug 2016
Reviewed by: Paul Fleckney
Reviewed at: Pleasance Courtyard