Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

It has all the right trappings – plot, props, visuals and more – but Nowt But Sea feels less like a formal show and more like just what besties Amy Gledhill and Chris Cantrill do to make each other laugh.

They have a wonderful chemistry, and the giggly energy of two people who can’t believe this is how they get to spend their time, coming up with daft ideas, and then being allowed to see them through.

Sometimes Cantrill superficially projects an image of being too good for this stuff, and Gledhill driven purely by lust - but it doesn’t take much for them to break character. 

They’re torn between advancing the silly story and the much more tempting option of just dicking about. Their warm-up, performed as their charming selves rather than their only marginally different alter-egos, is actually better without a narrative to serve. But they need something to hold a full hour together, so let the adventure begin.

This particular absurd escapade starts when big-shot celebrity agent Cedric L'Shay invites them to his private island. And in their desperate quest for fame, they readily accept, for surely nothing bad ever happened on an island owned by a wealthy white man…

Gledhill used to perform the Delightful Sausage act in a full-sized hotdog outfit that was never referenced. Well, now the pair of them have a devised costume even more cumbersome to get them to this deserted territory. And it soon looks as if they have become Stranded in the wrong place after Cantrill discards their oars in naive confusion about what they are. What lengths must they go to in order to survive?

However it turns out they are where they are supposed to be, even if L’Shay might not be all he seems. Have the Delightful Sausage had their chips? Paul Dunphy, who you might recognise from the Larry & Paul double act who went viral with fake Ministerial press conferences during lockdown, is suitably skin-crawling as the lascivious villain. But as he gets between our heroes, he inevitably disrupts the rapport between Cantrill and Gledhill that is so appealing.

The show is not short of gags, both visual and verbal, spanning OnlyFans kinks, early onset pubic hair, Cantrill’s crush on Victoria Coren Mitchell and a feud with TV’s Stephen Mulhern. Despite their haphazard performance, their misadventure is relatively tightly plotted to pull all these elements together, even if the unsubtle story only ever really makes sense in their bonkers alternative universe. 

But their positive, gleeful – yes, delightful – personas keep proceedings buoyant, whatever may happen at sea.

• The Delightful Sausage: Nowt but Sea is on at Monkey Barrel Comedy at 12.45pm

Review date: 18 Aug 2022
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club