The Life Doctor is a multimedia comic production from the minds of Adam Lawrence and Phil Wang. The premise is that Lawrence plays a makeover show host called The Life Doctor, and during the course of his show he ‘fixes’ all of the problems in his guests’ lives.

The comedy itself isn’t particularly sophisticated or original, but is very often endearing and laugh-out-loud funny. The sheer silliness of the execution makes up for some of the potential shortcomings of the concept: there are countless quasi-totalitarian chat show parodies, but one forgets this when watching The Life Doctor thanks to an almost constant bombardment of both daft puns and silly physical comedy. For example, The Life Doctor comes onstage in increasingly bizarre ways, and Lawrence and Wang have the knack for really good visual jokes. The flipside of this, however, is that there are some pig-awful puns every now and again and one feels disappointed that the comedians even expected you to laugh at them, and sometimes Lawrence’s wild gesticulating goes from humorously vacuous to simply over-egging.

In terms of the ensemble performances, Joe Bannister is absolutely wonderful at conveying the awkwardness and romantic desperation of his character. One protracted film section includes Bannister’s character walking around London and Cambridge, accidentally terrorising bemused women with his clumsy romantic advances. Elsewhere, George Potts does a good turn as a failing scriptwriter, and Mairin O’Hagan was immensely likeable the moment she came onstage. Jason Forbes was generally good and had plenty of energy, but sometimes the energy went from funny to showing him up as a bit of try-hard. Furthermore, there were multiple instances in which he delivered lines over laughter, which is a big contrast to George Potts, who expertly navigated multiple waves of laughter near the absurd finale.

As a final note, the multimedia aspects generally worked very well. They were well shot, professional, and the mock commercial breaks in particular were wonderfullly absurd. As a cautionary note, however, it’s easy to get carried away with films and newfangled gadgets, and I wouldn’t want a comedy that was over-reliant on such things. For starters, once something is recorded, one can’t gauge the laughter of the audience and adapt accordingly. At the end of the production, there is a blooper reel, which struck me as incredibly vain. They’re okay if you’ve just seen a serious film with Robert De Niro, and want to see him pulling funny faces out of character afterwards, but no-one really wants to see any Tom, Dick or Harry corpsing through a take. On the whole, however, this is a very good production, and it should be seen and cherished for doing something different to the usual Cambridge comedy fare.