Do you need some framing device or overarching concept to sell a sketch show these days? It looks as if double-act Grubby Little Mitts have a corker on their hands at the start of Hello, Hi, which sets up two porous realities: the placid present moment and some nightmare sketch-comedy realm – all panic and delinquent behaviour – bursting out of two boxes centre-stage. It’s a high-stakes and whirlwind start to this sophomore show from Rosie Nicholls and Sullivan Brown, but it’s not a conceit they choose to sustain for the whole show.
We’re soon back in the territory of one sketch after another, with the only connecting tissue Nicholls and Brown’s warmth, between-scene backchat, and, particularly in Nicholls’ case, performing flair. Some standout scenes are all her, like the one in which she fences around a romantic proposal with so many qualifiers that she traps herself. A later solo scene pastiching sexist 70s spy novels is less buoyant.
That sketch, like others here, leans heavily on reveal-then-blackout convention. We’ve been spoilt in recent years for shows that take sketch far past that first base, and it sometimes feels as if Nicholls’ and Brown’s skits, amusing though they usually are, might have been steered to wilder or more surprising extremes. The one about the April Fools’ Day breakup, say. But sketch by punchy sketch, the pair maintain a high standard, in a spirit of fun exchange with the audience.
Highlights include a scene about Rosie’s maternal urges, or lack thereof, and a recurring faux-TV show about a sexually frustrated hen. (Sometimes the arbitrariness is part of the joke.) You’ll see the final blow-out of a sketch coming a mile off, meanwhile, without that in any way compromising its uproarious toilet-humour idiocy.
It’s a straightforward sketch show, then – but an adept and appealing one.
• At Assembly George Square Studios, Edinburgh, until 28 August
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