I suppose the title shouldn’t have got my hopes up. As it turned out the play wasn’t all that awful. It had the odd moment that made me laugh. A bit. In an audience of about six one felt obliged really.

Of course there’s nothing worse than performing a comedy to a tiny audience. Gags can fall flat, punch lines stimulate two or three rather polite titters. Actually, on the opening night this wasn’t really the case. A pair in the front laughed hysterically all the way through. This was very sweet of them, although I can’t say the play entirely deserved it.

There are probably worse ways to spend an hour: Dodgy Alan escapes from prison and sets up a dating agency. Hilarity ensues involving various members of the agency’s clientele, a bank robbery, blackmail, and an undercover police job. I think.

If I’m honest it was pretty crappy. Accents were awry, jokes feeble, acting unsubtle. What just about made it OK was that everybody involved sort of knew it. It wasn’t great theatre but it wasn’t pretending to be. The odd corpsing cast member didn’t seem to matter. Everybody had learned their lines well enough, the lights came on and off in all the right places. There were two very nice cameos from Edmund Howard as a drainage-obsessed civil servant, and Mark Fiddaman in a bizarre but funny interlude from the play’s “sponsors.”

I would say go and see it. Everything that’s wrong with it you can forgive, just. Don’t entirely get off your high horse but at least sit back on the saddle and have a little bit of fun while you’re there.

But not in the Corpus Playroom. Not for six pounds a ticket. I suppose it is a little perverse to say that the Corpus Christi freshers’ show shouldn’t be staged in the Corpus Playroom. Yet the current Cambridge dramatic “scene” seems to deem the Corpus Playrooms as second only to the ADC and this is the sort of show that a group of freshers put on for a laugh in the last week of term in their JCR. Not in the Corpus Playroom. Not for six pounds a ticket. Not on your life. By Oliver Soden