Setting out on a seventy-five performance stint across two continents, the Footlights tour show is an ambitious project.  An ambitious project that succeeds with genius. Footlights Fiddaman, Ashenden, Lawrence and Owen had the audience in stitches with their slick sketches.

The show was structured to perfection: masterful transitions between scenarios – as the last line of a sketch opened the next with a twist – kept the show fresh and exciting.  The writers understood, however, that repetition of the same technique might become stale, and so kept the audience forever engaged and interested with near perfect synchronisation between audio and movement.  Much effort and careful thought had clearly been put in to make the sketches visually and aurally interesting outside the confines of the punch lines themselves: the auditorium was filled with waves of laughter as Lawrence and Fiddaman played a superlatively brilliant scene miming a muddled tune on a non-existent piano.

What came across so powerfully from the evening was a real sense that the performers understood the art of balance and measure in comedy.  Only on one occasion, when Ashenden played a car dealer, did a sketch feel like it was being pushed beyond its natural life; otherwise the troupe skilfully worked their way through a great variety and mixture of characters and scenarios.  With slight, seemingly effortless changes of posture and facial expression, the troupe breezed through sports commentators, businessmen, computer hackers, mountaineers, tour guides, robots, middle-aged-beer-bellied-and-burger-eating-men-in-the-pub, amongst very many more brilliantly captured characters.  Attention to detail was supreme.  Mark Fiddaman stole the show, at once brilliantly funny as an impostor Swedish masseur; Jed, a timid leader of the truth-spoon confession ring, and a worried lab technician in a cloning room full of cats.

The troupe handled audience expectation with great skill.  A scene on death row between jailer and jailed had a very obvious punch line, yet with just the right amount of suspense before the denouement, the scene came off well – judging by the shaking silhouettes of shoulders in the audience.  Recurring jokes were used sensitively, always in an unexpected context: one joke of Lawrence’s characters was to raise an eyebrow whilst audio played of his conscience deliberating a white lie.

Being only the second night of the tour, the troupe have plenty of time to polish out slight imperfections.  Character and accents were held well; yet, if one were to nitpick, Lawrence on occasion lost character in his solo scenes, grinning at the audience’s evident delight.  One movement scene between knights unfortunately descended into farce; a great shame given the artistry that had gone into the show overall.  These were slight glitches in one evening’s performance; the show as a whole deserves to do very well indeed.