SKINNYFEST 3 - Shamwagon

Moonlighting from their Victorian sketch-comedy show Aeneas Faversham, Edinburgh's Penny Dreadfuls appear at the Pleasance Below with an hour of improvised comedy. It's impossible to predict how improv will go: its successes, of course, depend on the individual epiphanies in that particular performance. But on the night witnessed by this particular writer, Shamwagon took the crowd's suggestions and ran all the way to funnyland. They crossed the canals of hilarity, climbed the mountains of ridiculousness, jumped the hahas of the hysterical.

It comes down, of course, to the troupe: they were loose, inspired, and they snatched every opportunity they spied. A farmer talks of an anti-mole alarm and immediately there are floppy arms all around, living representations of sound waves. A man describes wrestling a tiger and the creature leaps from stage-right, floppy-haired and full of fangs. While only one woman numbers among them, there's no lack of variety in Shamwagon's cast: the short and schizoid one, the creepy black-humoured one, the sharp and middle-aged one, the lanky one who plays dumb. The marvel is how well they work together, throwing themselves into the silly and the gut-busting with a beautiful, skull-cracked ease.