Ealing Live! is a character comedy laboratory that has been making waves at Ealing Studios in west London. It is playing one week in Edinburgh, and offers rousing testimony to the preeminence of character acts in comedy today. Featuring seven or eight acts, and hosted on first night by Canadian stand-up Phil Nichol, it eschews the back-slapping atmosphere or homogeneity of late-night stand-up bills, and has a much higher hit rate than conventional sketch shows.
There are no duff acts here, and none that outstay their welcome. Standouts include John Hopkins' and Gareth Tunley's cowboys, a Two Ronniesesque skit in which a pair of ranchers apply increasingly absurd descriptions to celebrity friends and fixate on what goes on "in the mind of a cow". Simon Farnaby plays John Pinner, a science lecturer crippled by a sense of his own boringness. Shelley Longworth is a cheerful charity chef seized violently by spirits. There's a pleasingly rough-and-ready feel to proceedings, as Justin (Jeremy Lion) Edwards wafts in and out dressed as a burly archangel, and Katherine Jakeways and Katy Brand pitch in with right-on heckles from the crowd. There are characters here that could easily expand into hour-long shows; others are happy to be their brief and brilliant selves. And I was very happy spending time with them.
· Until Saturday. Box office: 0131 556 6550.
