Sex. Terrorism. Disneyland. If you think the themes of Week 3’s Corpus Lateshow sound thesp-tastically awful, you would be right - they are drolly, deliciously so. These tasteless ingredients combine in Mark Ravenhill’s 2005 comedy, Product, as the components of a inconceivably crap, post-9/11 Hollywood blockbuster, the script for which is peddled by a fawning producer to an unseen starlet over the course of the 45 minute play.

To get technical, Product is four-woman adaption of a second-person monologue, in which each actor is simultaneously the producer pitching to the actress, the characters in the film narrative he is describing, and onlookers like us to the whole debacle. And if that sounds confusing, I apologise. But it is all the more a testament to the cast and crew that the audience never once feels alienated by this. Instead, the actors slip effortlessly between these abstract layers and drag us, gawping, along with them, assisted by the snappy lighting and innovative staging - all of which is executed with telepathic precision and synchronicity.

I was skeptical when I read this was to be a four-person cast of what was originally a one-man show, first performed by Ravenhill himself. But since seeing Lucy Moss’s pacy take on the inner workings of a corporate salesmen in the guise of ‘artist’, I can’t imagine it any other way. The multiplicity of actors means the show is fast - very fast - and the entire thing buzzes with a bizarre sense of its own schizophrenic energy. It is a tricky thing to get an audience to laugh at dialogue only 30 seconds into a show, but Product manages it, bolstered as it is by the collective confidence of every actor on stage. Special mention must nevertheless go the the exceptional performance by Yasmin Freeman, who nails every character she steps into with incisive comedic vigour. 

The other twist to Moss’s show is the gender-bending cast. Though the character of the producer could quite easily be played as a woman (as Olivia Poulet did in the 2014 Edinburgh tour), Moss has her four female actors playing men. “There is something really interesting about watching a female actor playing a man being very sexist about women”, Moss said in her interview with Varsity. Indeed, the actors are arguably all the more merciless in their depiction of the obliviously sexist sycophant because they are removed enough to be able to climb inside the character without any qualms. They unanimously nail the physicality of the Producer to a tee, due to the frequency, perhaps, with which each actor is forced to view this theatre-dwelling specimen in its natural habitat.

But perhaps it’s also, y’know, because they are each individually excellent actors, who have been given the opportunity to run free with the kind of cocky, punchy, unselfconscious humour that so many productions seem, out of habit, to reserve only for men.

Regardless, the misogyny-disguised-as-edginess of the Hollywood world (“So, you just have this aaaching sexuality!”) is handled with electrifying comic insight, the actors allowing just the tiniest amount of toungue-in-cheek knowing to seep through their otherwise deadpan performances. This innately female confidence lets the audience laugh easily and exuberantly at what is often seen as an untouchably controversial subject. The case was not always so the for the Islamophobic content of the fictional film. Though the humour lies in the movie world’s mindless marketisation of what they consider to be a typical Muslim narrative, there was nevertheless the slightest sense of nervousness in the direction and performance of these jokes. Undeniably the gags were still funny; but not delivered quite assuredly enough to coax the same furious belly-laughter as other moments in the play.

The sex jokes, on the other hand, are fearless. There is something of a penchant within Cambridge student comedies for explicit, in-your-face sexual humour, which usually transpires to be an unoriginal and uncomfortable affair. Product, I am sure they will be proud to hear, delivers the best sexual comedy I have seen so far. The cast parodies the ridiculousness of Hollywood’s steamier scenes with grotesque sincerity, and I challenge you not to heave with laughter at the red-lit, thunderously orgasmic exhibition of sensual overload in which the producer earnestly attempts to visualise for his young starlet the moment her character is - as he so nauseatingly puts it - ‘inseminated’.

Product is a precocious, pacy comedy unlike any other you will see this term. Whilst all will get a kick out of the shrewd script and slick staging, this one is particularly for the thesps among us; go laugh at this acerbic take on the more depressing aspects of your world - trust me, it’s good for you.