SkinnyFest 3 - The Future

The Fringe is rightly famous as a testing ground for the comedy stars of tomorrow. One of the few institutions with a similar power to attract and nurture young talent, and with an even longer history, is the Cambridge Footlights drama club. Jonny Sweet and Joe Thomas, the pair who have written and perform in The Future, are leading members of Footlights, and there is an aspirational quality to this new production – already short-listed for the Writers' Guild Award - that fits its position on two of the entertainment world's most reliable launch-pads.

With this in mind, The Future is a clever name for a show. It cockily invites punters to assume favourable career-paths for the performers concerned, and tempts journalists with a range of workable puns that require a minimum of effort to conceive. The Future is a clever show, too: a connected series of sketches set in a vaguely futuristic, vaguely corporate workplace, its humour is weighted towards carefully wrought, fast-paced dialogue and oddly illogical disagreements. Such pessimistic depictions of inescapable communication failure contrast with a light-hearted daftness, leading to barely-stifled giggles from the performers and an enjoyably nuanced tone throughout.

Though both likeable, neither Sweet nor Thomas comes across as a 'natural' comic or actor. With The Future, however, they have crafted a highly entertaining hour of semi-surrealist writing that, in its hard-worked quality and only occasional lapses, suggests they will develop into exactly the performers they wish to be. Time, it should be noted, is on their side.