Sketch comedy is, by its nature, a slightly hit-and-miss affair. It’s situational and a situation that one person finds hilarious could fly right past another. It’s a difficulty that Goes Well With Cheese have cleverly tried to avoid with a quick-fire show which throws in gags at a relentless pace,
Good strategy but it’s a bit hit-and-miss. There are some interesting set-ups but the relentless pace of the show means that few get the development they need. Sketches such as ‘Forgettable Monarchs’ and ‘Drama Student Outreach’ show promise but are quickly abandoned in favour of a slightly-clunky setup to the next 30 second skit.
At this point I feel I should say that I really like Goes Well With Cheese. Mark, Keir, Jacob and Perdita throw themselves around the stage with rubber-faced glorious abandon. And with Stephen Mawhinney providing a solid centre to the action all the ingredients are there for a top-notch show. But this isn’t quite it – the material just isn’t there.
That’s not to say there aren’t a few well-developed gems in the morass – the dating site for the modern day, a judgemental supermarket scanner and the sex shop for the extremely perverted – and it’s impossible to fault the enthusiasm. But one gets the feeling that Goes Well With Cheese need to take a hard look at their full back-catalogue and consider which sketches And maybe less of the badgers...
A young, promising sketch troupe but, at the moment, all cheese, not enough cracker.
