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Neighbourhood Watch: Crime doesn’t pay

As I sat awaiting the start of this brand new play, I was informed about its genesis. Fusing the quirky humour styles of two students, the production team told me, they had strived to create something that they saw as missing from Oxford’s stage scene. Having endured only three scenes, I can see manifold reasons for such a play’s hitherto absence.

Neighbourhood Watch is a bizarre exposition of gratuitous idiocy with all the wit of the Chuckle Brothers, all the humour of hepatitis, and all the acting skills of a slug’s understudy. The play – a pointless montage of archaic knob-gags, tired slapstick, and apalling French accents – apparently has a plot somewhere, involving robberies, paranoia and a neighbourhood-watch type scenario, but its presence was distorted beyond all recognition by the infuriating indulgence in pointless caricature and ubiquitous shouting.

Attempts at ironic self-parody, such as a one character telling the other he is “confusing, irritating and not funny”, fall hopelessly flat due to the play’s embarrassing lack of anything remotely resembling comedy. I did laugh once, but when an actor forgetting his lines gets a bigger reponse than any of the jokes in a so-called comedy, one knows one is observing something truly, chronically, shockingly dire.

I actually struggle to envisage what possible enjoyment anybody could derive from this thing, to the point where I ask myself: is it trying to be unfunny? Is the joke really on the poor, paying members of the audience? If so, God help us all.

Towards the end of the preview, the gormless Albert is seen sweeping bits of paper, sending them rolling slowly over the centre stage. Perhaps tumbleweed would have been more apt.

With Cuppers still fresh in our minds, surely we should celebrate student theatre: the hard-hitting relevance, the satirical splendour, the witty and the wonderful drama of which we know our eminent body of students so capable.
So, please, do not waste an hour of your life. Do something more enjoyable – staple your earlobes, perhaps. Or see something else.

BT LATE SLOT
Tuesday – Saturday 7th Week

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