Tarot @ Pleasance Courtyard

Tarot, a sketch ‘supergroup’ made up of members of Goose and Gein's Family Giftshop (Edward Easton, Kath Hughes and Adam Rowse respectively) trades in an almost unnerving immediacy. With moments of near-nudity and visceral, slapstick physicality, the liveness of the experience is very marked.

Cautionary Tales opens with a startling, mysterious tableau: swirling smoke and pentagrams daubed onto a screen. The way this mystery resolves into sudden, comic clarity is a pattern shared, very successfully, by many of the sketches that follow. The pointed message about the magical properties of the star system that so defines Fringe success is an important one, and seeing that addressed head-on is just one aspect of the show’s urgency.

Narratives are built, fall away, and are built again; hilariously bewildering circumstances suddenly resolve into sense, blokey banter disintegrates into sudden honesty, one set of conditions shifts into another; always with an enjoyable tension between the well-crafted scenario and the improvised, deliberately rough edges of the performances.

The group’s restless energy is a big part of the show’s success: however, while the distinctive physical zeal of the two men is given lots of scope, Hughes is not given enough to do. She’s a genial presence who provides helpful contrast, but it’s still tempting to imagine what some really anarchic feminine energy could bring.

‘Long live sketch’ is the group’s rallying cry; from the evidence of this show, their mission to put sketch back on the map is succeeding and then some.

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Tarot: Cautionary Tales, Pleasance Courtyard (Beside), until 28 Aug, 10pm, £9-12