All Edinburgh venues have their ghosts, and in the Pleasance Attic I’m haunted by the sister double-act Toby, who scored a distinctive dark-comic hit here five years ago. Katie Norris and Sinead Parker tread a similarly twisted path, in See You at the Gallows, a show that takes the desperate, the deluded and the psychopathic for its subjects. But there’s nothing sombre about it – it’s a hoot.
It could scarcely have a more up-and-at-’em start, as Norris and Parker in catsuits and hot-pink wigs belt out a militant song-and-dance number about feminazism. But in Parker’s case, the belligerence is a sham: she is, it is soon revealed, neurotic, unloved and in the throes of a life crisis at 29. However, no-nonsense Norris considers their partnership strictly business, and seeks a life elsewhere as “a stepmother and a wife”.
That’s the thread, from which are strung just a few loose, lurid sketches – about a repressed Somerset schoolteacher visited by swaggering Manc performance poet Jackie Cooper Clarke, or a spate of cannibal killings in Wetherby under investigation by macho, mullet-toting cop Dick and his bubble-permed, sexually frustrated secretary Diane.
It’s flamboyantly silly – shades of We Are Klang, one-third of whom (Steve Hall) directs – and there’s a pleasing looseness to how the show flits between theatrical styles. But there’s a bedrock of fine, funny writing and skilful comic performance, including that of N&P’s musical director, Chris Thomson. Save one throwaway audience participation interlude, hosted by two Aussie wannabe catering magnates, the mirth is near constant.
- At the Pleasance Attic, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
