Settling back for a night of edgy comedy at the ADC on Tuesday night, I was instead disappointed to find myself sitting through a not-particularly-funny pantomime. The premise of Odds was ambitious, and the plot initially seemed promising: a recently widowed man who has spent all his money on his wife's funeral sells his soul to a loan shark played by Footlights veteran Ralph Shirley. Pretty soon, he finds his house invaded by a pack of club scouts, headed by militant and sexually voracious brown bear, Jessie Wyld. The invasion of the green-clad trio is shortly followed by an evil politician. Meanwhile, the loan shark tries to win over the widower's daughter by monotonously espousing the virtues of Charles Dickens.

By the end of the play, Shirley's stock phrase 'Bleak House is soooo gooood!' was making the audience wince. And this was not the only joke that wore itself out. As a sketch, the set-up could have been hilarious, but there was simply not enough energy there to stretch it into a whole play, and by the second half it was as soggy as the pancakes most of the audience were fantasizing about cooking when they got home. The use of a video screen as a TV whilst the Footlights stars 'watched' on stage was initially entertaining, but the clips went on far too long. In fact, the whole thing went on far too long.

In spite of the weak script, The Spring Revue had its moments. Original, quirky jokes popped up here and there, and the performances on the whole were good. Whilst the plot flopped, it did provide a showcase for the idiosyncrasies of the Footlights team's talent: Nick Ricketts gave a good rendering of a dippy bereaved daddy, and Mark Fiddaman played a ghoulishly creepy politician. Tom Pye's body language was hilarious, but then he could make a reading of Gordon Brown's grocery list speech crippling funny stand-up. The main problem was that there was not enough to tie the funny bits together: though I got the giggles a couple of times, for the most of it I was struggling to keep my eyes open.

The technical team hazarded an attempt at special effects, although their timing was disastrous. During the last scene, the music blared out so loudly that it sounded like a 'Donk' rave on Wigan Pier - people were actually putting their hands over their ears, and there was nothing that the actors on stage could do.

The fault of the play may just have been, other than the technical let-downs, that it was simply too ambitious. The two straight leads felt incongruous with the others, who were each lost in their own, intermittently brilliant, character acting. In parts it was entertaining; as a whole it was disjointed - the cumulatively obvious lack of laughs felt awkward, and clearly impacted on the performers morale. The majority of the material was well worn for anyone with even minor experience of Cambridge comedy. The writing was, much of the time, as flat as the proverbial pancake.