Sitcom: A Sitcom
This new comedy was a little hit and miss, says Gabriella Jeakins
This new piece of original comedy takes place on the set of the pilot episode of a sitcom featuring every cliché in the book. There’s a slobbish guy exasperating his uptight flatmate, a sexy but airheaded girl next door and a wacky Russian lodger.
The show does get the atmosphere right. As we walked into Pembroke New Cellars, the actors were milling around, preparing for the show, the actor playing the sitcom’s director sat among the audience during ‘filming’ and there were even cheesy credits at the end. This was an idea that had been thought out and these little details certainly added a lot.
Most of the humour came from the scenes in between takes of the sitcom, in which we saw the actors’ reactions to the ridiculously bad script. Particularly funny was the character of exaggerated thespian Margot, played by Evie Butcher, who was a brilliant contrast with her silly and rather trashy character of Alison in the show. While the cast of the sitcom were all far too exaggerated to be likeable, the portrayals of the actors Frankie and Ivan by Patrick Wilson and Štefan Benčík were more down to earth and added a little more variety to a humour that was otherwise based largely on exaggeration.
However, while the show did have some great ideas and many fantastic comic elements, I don’t feel they fully sustained the performance. The sitcom setting worked well initially but I quickly became bored of the scenes of deliberately gratingly bad humour. Unfortunately, the many elements of the comedy which were funny were still not quite enough to fill the whole hour, and there were a few awkwardly under-polished scenes. The ending was also very confusing. It consisted of a monologue from the director of the sitcom discussing the nature of her work and whether it was worth all the trouble it had caused amongst its actors. It did not seem to be intended as serious, but I failed to see where the humour in it was supposed to have come from, and it broke the otherwise coherent tone of the show.
Overall, this new student writing certainly has potential, with some great jokes and characters that went down well with the audience, but certain elements unfortunately let it down.
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