Umbrella Birds

One of the curses of the festival is that a town one twentieth the size of London struggles to accommodate the hundreds of venues required. As a result you end up with a host of sub-standard venues like the Pleasance Cellar: hot, cramped and horrendously uncomfortable. Luckily that's no problem for the Umbrella Birds, a quartet who last year hired out a portaloo to host their show and are therefore used to playing in—ahem—shitty venues.

That show featured the Umbrella Girls playing out a comedy skit based around the comings and goings in a women's toilet and, with originality clearly at a premium, the same idea is at play in this year's show. Except we're in a gym, apparently. However, if the idea was somewhat short of revolutionary then some of their sketches go overboard in attempting to regather the reins. Crazed yoga instructors, monsters in the car park and bigamist urologists are, unfortunately, vaguely funny at best.

It's when the quartet stick to poking fun at gym and exercise culture in general that they do themselves justice. A sketch involving a woman in full furry shark costume running on the treadmill—she's training for the marathon—and another where three gym goers attempt to discover what those big rubber balls are actually for both go down far better than the more off kilter attempts. And given that, it's at least better fun than actually spending an hour in the gym.