Elsewhere on the fringe, sketch troupe Kieran and the Joes' spoof Milgram experiment purports to show how easily we can be induced to do terrible things. Something similar happens in this offering from dance/comedy double-act New Art Club, which casts its audience as the populations of rival Cambridgeshire villages. It's a right lark, as a dispute over the train station's name boils over, and the burghers of Meldreth start lobbing missiles at their Melbourn neighbours. But a subplot about the Battle of the Somme warns what can happen when food-chucking patriotism arrives at its logical conclusion.
If that sounds strange and sui generis, well, it is. Tom Roden and Pete Shenton have largely dispensed with dance this year, ostensibly in a bid for Morecambe and Wise-level TV fame. But their show retains a personality all its own. On one level, it's a participatory romp, in which we compete for points and civic pride in various daft stunts such as speed-eating cornflakes. Meanwhile, the wired and wiry Shenton and the kindly Roden describe the latter's recent relocation to rural Meldreth. We visit the church fete, where Shenton pelts an unhappy vicar with wet sponges. We're given a comically "overblown and pompous" (their words) inventory of the area. And we attend the Meldreth, Shepreth and Foxton Rail Users Society's fateful AGM.
All this interactive fun is complicated, however, by Roden's story about researching the local war-dead, and by a parallel narrative in which Shenton mercy-kills an injured bullfinch. These are not done po-faced: the performers cheekily upstage and cut across one another's stories. But they add a discordant bass-note to the raucous but shallow gang-show antics. Playful, charismatic performers, Shenton and Roden are no slouches at Eric and Ernie-style entertainment, but they're at their best when they're more intriguing than that.
