Thankless Child

After distinguished service with Edinburgh University’s acclaimed ad lib comedy troupe The Improverts, Freya Slipper and Liz Black are used to producing loud, fast-moving sketch routines that give an audience no clue as to the next, wonderfully surreal change of direction.They’ve done well to retain the sheer vitality of those improvised routines in a debut two-woman show suffused with wackiness which—for the most part—works with a slickness worthy of far more seasoned performers.

The dynamic between the two is constantly shifting, as they run through a cast of characters ranging from two of the three blind mice to a TV hostess reducing a guest to tears with jibes about her dead brother – a scene that stays just on the right side of tasteless, and is in truth all the funnier for it. A sketch in which the Queen inexplicably changes her name to Voleman is delivered with glorious understatement, and a haunting tale of betrayal in the form of a jaunty sailors’ song is superbly conceived.

Still, there’s some room for improvement. The running theme of acting out proverbs (“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” with a pair of chickens, for example) is a nice idea that begins to wear as the show progresses, while the concluding punchlines of scenes occasionally fail to do justice to what’s gone before. But each of these comics is capable of reducing an audience to hysterics with a single glance. Given time to build an entire show at the level of their strongest sketches, they should prove a very exciting prospect indeed.