Tea and Cake II: In The Gateau

Talk about kicking someone when they're down. If there were any more cheap shots directed at mime artists in this show it'd be almost worth the ticket price which, incidentally, is more than anyone should have to pay to bear witness to this tiresome sketch comedy.

Much of the material is comprised of well-intentioned stabs at social commentary. Shots are taken at odious daytime television and the prevalent social hysteria over pederasty. What starts as a satisfyingly brusque comedic rudeness and easy obscenity in handling these topics quickly becomes a simple lesson in comedy writing – there's such a thing as too much anger.

Nearly all the characters despise each other to a greater or lesser extent, and before long the mindless and unrelenting vituperation becomes difficult to withstand. Pretensions of a Chris Morris-esque veneer of controlled contempt is not an easy one to maintain, and the performers in Tea and Cake II: In The Gateau fall some way short of this mark.

The culmination of the show is a dramatised blooper reel derived from the sketches just performed. Although executed with the same unstudied crudity as the rest of the material, it's a curious idea that could surely have yielded more comic results. It's a wise idea to establish your material before riffing on it, though. This endeavour, like much of the remainder of the performance, is inevitably hampered by generous lashings of vulgarity, which lose their effectiveness once saturation point is reached. It's a never a good sign when the one of the best jokes in the show is a bad pun in the title.