A quick note before we start: this curse has nothing to do with either myself or the many others who populate this most illustrious section of your favourite free student newspaper. Very few of us dabble in the occult, to the best of my knowledge. Rather, this curse is rather different. Review is spelt differently. This is the Curse of the Oxford Revue.
Specifically, this curse is placed on a small village called Blight-upon-Cripple, a place that is as strange as it is charmingly-named, and it is to this town that intrepid reporter Kirsty Kirstyson is sent, chasing a story about a vole that bears a striking resemblance to Geri Halliwell. Instead, she stumbles across a town that has been living under the shadow of a terrifying curse for the past three decades. Being the intrepid reporter that she is, she decides to investigate. But none of that matters, to be quite frank. This is a sketch show, in the manner of so many flying circuses and pairs of Ronnies. Plot barely figures. Neither does character. The small troupe display a remarkable range, fleshing out a variety of characters, some one-offs and others recurring figures. An early sketch, and a particularly brilliant one at that has the Brazilian president and his advisor celebrating the rebound of their country’s economy based upon the revival of their most vital export, the Brazilian Darkness chocolate. Another is a song on the subject of the Viking funeral, a truly spectacular piece of verbal acrobatics. You get the idea.
Whilst some sketches are nothing short of genius, however, some fall flat. This is hardly the fault of the cast, who remain polished and professional throughout. One can hardly criticise their sense of timing, or their self-confidence: the troupe act with bombast and poise regardless of the quality of their material. You’ll notice that I refer to the actors here in the plural: it is very hard to pick a stand-out performer, or one who is significantly less talented than the others. Rather, it is the writing that tends to fall flat. The sketches take a Python-esque aspect, hinging around the sheer mass of non-sequitur and sheer inanity that characterises, say, And Now for Something Completely Different. Sometimes, this works spectacularly. Take, for example, the song about Viking funerals that I mentioned earlier: wonderfully, gleefully silly. A sketch depicting two couples playing a game of something called Beaver-ball that involved verbal abuse and interpretive dance had the audience, myself included, in paroxysms of laughter and sheer bafflement, and was arguably the high point of the proceedings. Others, though, less good. Talking about these is slightly harder: they’re just not memorable. It’s not that they were dreadful. The comedy wasn’t dissimilar, the acting was still excellent. They just weren’t as funny.
And this is what makes summing up this review very difficult. Whilst the Curse of the Oxford Revue did contain sketches of sheer, comic genius, acted out by some undoubtedly fine comedians, it also contained moments which just fell flat. In a traditional play, this kind of inconsistency would prove fatal, but the Curse of the Oxford Revue is not such a play; rather, it is a sketch show. Should it be judged by the same standards as a play, as the same sort of unified whole? More crucially, however, should a sketch show be so uneven as to inspire my pedantic musing in search of some form of critical justification one way or the other? Probably not.
3 stars
