Comedy: Pick Me Up
Rivkah Brown was thoroughly delighted by her final journey into the comedy scene this week
For their latest comic voyage, some of Footlight’s finest comics have set sail into the land of the classic comedy sketch show. Though a standard comic format, the foursome (made up of Lowell Belfield, Jason Forbes, George Potts, and Ryan O'Sullivan) did it to perfection.
The audience devoured each of the 30-odd short, sharp scene, each building up to an explosion of applause. The imaginative range of the sketches was astounding, with George Potts alone playing everything from smug new mum to arsey Jesus. Moments where it looked like they were about to corpse were drowned out by the audience’s own torrential laughter.
Dialogue was tight, particularly as Forbes and O’Sullivan hurled ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ across the stage in a shrewd Shakespearean pastiche. The mixture of sadism and silliness in Pott’s housewifely psychopath, Belfield’s lip-curling archness as a bastardly boss, both had a particularly Pythonic ring.
What pushed the show to quasi-professionalism, however, was its tech. Sound was of a notably high standard: transitions were perfectly timed, and I was impressed that they’d managed to dig out the Mario theme tune for a delicious Mario Brothers domestic. The show made inventive use of lighting for comic effect, as a sudden change from lowlights to spotlight was at times both dramatic and bathetic, creating atmospheric u-turns in a milisecond.
The show’s most impressive feature, however, was the slow realisation that these sketches, strong enough in their own right, were part of a master comedy: in one fell swoop, ‘Pick Me Up’ had outdone itself.
300 words is insufficient to expound the myriad virtues of ‘Pick Me Up’, but I’ll leave it at this: ‘Pick Me Up’ is without a doubt the funniest thing the ADC will see this term, and if you miss it, you’re an idiot.
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