It's what a performer does in adversity which really shows their true colours. When Andy Higson and Stephen Matthew found, on what was their first performance of Firenado!, that they had no music to cover the scene changes, they hummed it instead. It sounds a bit silly. It was a bit silly. But also just great fun. A truth which pretty much sums up the show.
This is a refreshingly unpretentious sketch show. The sketches are short and the premises easy to grasp. None of the subjects are terribly original - what’s that, ad men are shallow and lie? - but there’s a charm to this. Unlike so many sketch shows, you know when you’re supposed to laugh and, by and large, you do.
Unfortunately the flip-side of this unpretentiousness was some pretty ropey production values. The room in which they were performing had no back stage, which can’t have made things easy, but that meant that discipline, and in particular not whispering to each other between scenes, was all the more important. Also, even for a first performance there was a lot of corpsing.
The boys were at their best doing sketches that were completely daft. Want to see a man think up a host of themed words related to penis against the clock? You’ve got it. Some of the political material dragged a bit but this was more than counterbalanced by gems such as a spoof meta-sketch.
If you're on Princes Street around tea time and fancy some clean good-natured giggles, you could do a whole lot worse than heading along to the RAOB Club and seeing Firenado!
