The Footlights’ Tour Show is, in a word, exciting. The final spoken line – Tom Fraser sullenly lamenting that the prank played on him happens ‘every time’ -must surely be tongue in cheek, as so little throughout this jam-packed hour of sketches plays out the same way every time. Each one of the five Footlights was visibly in danger of corpsing at various points, which, at the end of a two month tour, is quite an achievement. There’s a clear sense of camaraderie, and it’s this especially tight ensemble that ultimately stops Real Feelings from tipping over into a parade of solo performers, and keeps it, at its best, a clever - but not obtuse - collaborative show.

It’s unavoidable that Real Feelings becomes a showcase of sorts, but on the whole the team manage to vary the style and pace of the sketches enough that it flaunts their collective, rather than individual, talents. The opening is easily as slick as you’d expect, yet only a few scene changes later Ben Pope and Alex MacKeith invite chaos as they improvise in (usually) perfect unison. The chameleon sketch has a classic structure with a clearly signalled, squirm-inducing punch line; it’s followed by the most bizarre and incomprehensible flea circus ever imagined. From character monologues to songs, there’s very little that’s outside of their range.

Some moments do feel incongruous, though. MacKeith defending a sketch where a dog infiltrates a protest unravels the momentum too close to the end of the show for it to fully recover, and James Bloor can’t fail to steal the stage with his boundless energy when his role is only to introduce MacKeith’s characters. And with such dominant stage presence and physicality, it seems a shame that the group takes so long off stage giving out paper plates.

The acting is of higher quality than the writing, but this is hardly an insult to the script (although the introductions to the restaurant sketches are disappointingly clunky): rather, the cast’s extreme commitment to character in every sketch is consistently impressive. Pope retains the same surely uncomfortable facial expression – while juggling flawlessly – as all manner of distractions rage on around him. And this makes it all the more enjoyable later when Fraser’s cryptic riddle about rose bushes and lemon trees sends Pope and the rest of the cast into uncontrollable laughter. It may not be perfect, but perhaps that’s the price for a show as exciting as this one.