Twenty-Four: The Sketch Show

Though the premise – twenty-four sketches for twenty-four hours of the day – isn’t an
entirely original one, it’s promising nonetheless. With sketch shows, often simple is best, and looking
at the set for this lateshow at the Pembroke Cellars – two chairs and a symbolic clock propped up to
the side of the stage – the set-up is pleasingly minimalist.

Whilst the premise and layout for Twenty-Four is promising, it is with the performers that the
show unfortunately falls flat. Describing themselves as ‘Footlights Smoker regulars’ in their press
release, Joe McGuchan and Alex Watson seem almost unaccustomed to performing comedy in front
of an audience, laughing within their own sketches several times in the initial half of the show. Breaks
in character during a sketch show can sometimes be just as amusing as the sketches themselves,
particularly in making the audience feel comfortable (something that is often crucial in a small and
intimate space such as the New Cellars), but the consistency of the actors in doing so quickly became
tiresome and worked to deplete any chemistry that McGuchan and Watson may share.

The writing of Twenty-Four does have its funny moments. Each sketch has at least an attempt
at a closing punchline, allowing the audience to feel that thought and effort has been put into each
one. The most consistent element of the writing is that of wordplay and other witticisms that serve to
give the impression that the entire show would be better received if read as a book rather than seen as
a play. McGuchan often distinguishes himself from Watson as the more comfortable and capable
performer on stage (his solo sketch, ‘Bob Wallace’s cooking for one’, being one of the few stand-outs
of the show), but has a habit of starting out a sketch with an overwhelming burst of energy that, by its
conclusion, has fizzled out entirely, leaving the audience more often than not underwhelmed.

A main issue for Twenty-Four is that it drags out sketches that would have been funny had
they been tighter or more succinctly rendered. Whilst the volume of sketches that was produced for
the show is no doubt impressive, it presumably hindered the amount of time and effort the performers
could have put into making sure they had as much of a chance as possible of being amusing. More
work and thought could and should have been put into imagining how these sketches would look to an
audience. McGuchan’s physical presence on stage in particular could have been capitalised on more,
as he has a great deal of potential for amusing physical comedy – though the performers worked to
pack into the script a good deal of verbal wit, this wasn’t always successful, and it came at the
expense of physical presence on stage – miming was often hurried and done as though the performers
were somehow embarrassed by it, and the rare use of props was much the same. Both performers’
potential for the clever use of props shone briefly through in their ‘can of coke’ sketch; it was tight,
witty, and physically amusing. Indeed, it was crucial in leaving the audience wondering why more of
the show couldn’t have been much the same.

What Twenty-Four probably would have benefitted the most from was a director. A third pair
of eyes would likely have done a great deal in cutting what needed to be cut, as well as drawing the
performers’ attention to how to make the show as appealing as possible to watch. The overarching
plot device of twenty-four hours in a day seemed almost irrelevant, failing to be reflected in any of the
sketches and only cursively mentioned at the beginning and the end. The lack of transitions made the
show feel disjointed and, to an extent, lazy.

Despite there being certain points of humour in Twenty-Four, they eventually numbered to
being all too few. They served to display to the audience the standard that the show could have
reached had its writer/performers more carefully fashioned it to be received as a stage performance
(as opposed to read in a script). The performers’ failure to fully inhabit any of the characters that they
created left them awkward and forced onstage – and the laughs they produced from their audience
were too.

(1.5 stars)