Writer: Joseph Hollas
Director: Jamie Saul
The London Underground can provide fertile ground for sketch comedy. It’s a service that is used by every stratum of the capital’s populace, and every few minutes, some characters get off to be replaced by others.
Theatrical company Brave Mirror, in their second collaboration with writer Joseph Hollas after 2023’s Attention Span, is unsatisfying with a mere evening of sketches, though. Instead, the skits are threaded through a story of a group of passengers who always find themselves travelling together, finding themselves constantly berated by an omniscient TfL announcer.
The sketches themselves take place on the Tube train – represented by five wooden chairs painted with a recognisable moquette design – and follow passengers to their work lives. Thus we get skits on coffee shop queueing, pernickety restaurant customers, and a motivational talk for new employees of a company selling windows and doors.
Unfortunately, the sketch content is rarely original – how many times have we seen someone give an overelaborate coffee order, for example? Too many scenes fade out into nothing, as the play seems determined to return to the characters in the carriage. One sketch, set on the This Morning sofa with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, takes an interesting angle but already feels past its expiration date.
Some respite comes from the occasional glimpses of something greater. Elsa Rae produces a blisteringly sad monologue as Winston, a man whose CD collection prompts him to recall the song that always reminds him of his mother. Tallula White’s overbearing HR manager is one of several of her characters that rise above the material, as does Joe Deighton when called upon to be anything other than surly youth Rodney.
Audience engagement isn’t helped by some directorial choices that seat the cast in the front row, leaving the onstage chairs empty. There also seems to be an overreliance on improvisational dialogue, even in the scenes concerning Hollas’s overarching plot that otherwise follows a predetermined narrative. Rather than enhancing the comedic aspects of the evening, there is a sense instead of under-rehearsal that does this promising cast no favours.
Coupled with a story that takes the setting well away from the fertile ground of London life by the evening’s end, there is a pall of opportunities lost within Attention All Passengers. There are enough nuggets hidden inside to hint at both the viability of the concept and the quality of the performers, but what surrounds the good is too messy and unpolished to ignore.
Reviewed on 28 May 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Messy sketch comedy
