I have to admit before going in to review that I hadn’t looked at the publicity material properly. I didn’t know what a Panopticon was, and I knew nothing about the show, only that I’d seen all of the performers in other shows and enjoyed them all. So I was anticipatory and had high hopes for the giggles or hopefully tears (of laughter) to fall aplenty, which turned out to be totally fulfilled.

There is a propensity for all Cambridge sketch shows to take a central “theme” or “idea” as a prop around which to base themselves. This is perfectly understandable as it’s tricky to just make a collection of different jokes for an hour with no connectivity. However this, it turns out, is one of Panopticon’s best features; this isn’t to say that it is formless; it is more free-flowing, wonderfully unbound from having to conform to any kind of central gag or device.

The only real connection between the different sketches is the interplaying of the three performers: Oliver Taylor, Tom Fairbairn and Rob Oldham, all of whom bring something superbly different and complementary to the maelstrom. Taylor often projects a straight-man persona, while Fairbairn and Oldham take many quirky or absurd situations or characters, but this is by no means all the time; the strength of all of them is that they can shift so well into whatever the next sketch is, although they often play on their apparent (and obviously amplified) real-world personalities: Oldham’s suffering from the well-known “English student’s illiteracy” is one example.

Any connection is the relations between them as performers; there are sketches when they address each other in “real life” as frustrated or passive-aggressive housemates, and sketches when they take the role of Yoda or Gandalf, and there seems to be no boundary in mixing the two; both work wonderfully different types of humour, and nothing feels jarring or forced. There is both deadpan, surreally absurd, cleverly written and purely silly humour criss-crossing and this boldness in trusting their own gifts at writing, mixing around and finally bringing it off with charm and energy is really refreshing. They have also opted to be fairly bare in set with a few props; however when they make use of real costumes it is to really devastating effect. Paring it back simply makes us concentrate on the performers, which works.

There is not a sketch which doesn’t get laughs aplenty, although of course some less than others, but to get every sketch topping the next is probably an impossibility. We’re not really looking into a Panopticon in which they are trapped and we laugh, a prison is exactly what the evening is not: Taylor, Fairbairn and Oldham handle and trust their material and each other brilliantly. For an audience, it is really liberating and relieving to know that you will be able to laugh at every sketch that comes, in the hands of natural comics. Go, if laughing is any fun for you.