Just Up The Stairs at The Caves is packed to the rafters for this mid-afternoon hour of sketch comedy. Sarah Campbell and Amy Hoggart (formerly of Cambridge Footlights) team up to deliver a wide array of weird, unexpected and often macabre characters. It is a bizarre audience where some members (including yours truly) enjoy the show without being entertained above sniggering level. Simultaneously however, a certain section of spectators laugh particularly loudly and I couldn’t help thinking that certain pockets of onlookers may not have been strangers to the performing duo.A true gamut of scenarios is delivered, from criminally overworked Tenerife club reps to an elderly couple that have settled into a bizarre routine that barely hides an aggressive tension just under the surface of their relationship. What makes Christmas for Two unique is that theirs is a comedy styling that is very hard to nail down. A sketch will be going down a certain route before the pair wrong-foot the audience and launch down a different (often dark) channel. While the two are certainly accomplished performers, their set is engaging rather than at risk of making me fall off my (very uncomfortable) chair in fits of laughter. One gets the feeling that the wrong-footing mechanism that they often utilise papers over some of the cracks in the set as the skits can often trail to a meandering end having been reasonably light on laughs.Having said this, a routine where a medium allows a young woman to contact her deceased father only for them to have nothing to say to each other is perhaps the high point of the hour and demonstrates the duo’s brimming talent. Considering their evident youth, this is a promising hour of comedy where they just need to shoehorn some slightly funnier lines into the mouths of their highly impressive and original characters to leave rivals trailing in their wake.
