New to the sketch comedy scene is a local five person troop known as The Consumption. Their Comedy Festival show was a series of often unrelated sketches with little in the way of segues between them, creating an often anarchic flavour to proceedings. They had fun playing around with theatrical conventions with a creative structure to the show that kept the audience of their toes. One particular highlight was an introductory segment placed mid way through the show that was performed in stereo like a bizzare low tech directors’ commentary on a DVD.
The material covered wide ranging topics that used plenty of wordplay and a great deal of surrealism to generate the humour. They weren’t afraid to get gory for some cheap yet disturbing laughs, especially in the filmed sketches. The film buffs in the audience had plenty of fun recognising some adaptations of movie sequences that were given a very silly twist and the hardcore comedy crowd were given plenty of sly winks at the comedic art form. Self referential humour played a major part in the show with constant witty comments critiquing their own performances that came dangerously close to being too indulgent. It was all pulled off well and had the audience in stitches throughout.
A number of recurring scenes and characters were used to introduce a taste of plot development but in doing so, the actors appeared to be working as pairs with the fifth actor floating between them which came across as recent drama graduates still performing in the pairs they worked in for class. Despite this the performers worked brilliantly with each other, some filling the straight man roles perfectly while others were given plenty of room to ham it up for maximum comedic effect.
Prerecorded video sketches featured heavily in the show, all were hilarious and slickly produced pieces. Mostly filmed around Footscray and surrounding areas, they were a mix of advertisement parody, one joke sketches and longer segments. It was intriguing that they chose to show the videos in large blocks. Other sketch shows would limit the videos to groups of two or three, but these guys were clearly marching to a different drummer in terms of show structure.
A lot of the sketches petered out at the end, often by design with cheeky swipes at the lack of punchlines and the exploitation of the humour of awkward silences. The only clear indication that a sketch had ended was with stage blackout but sometimes they played around with this by raising the lights to tack on a cute little moment to bring some semblance of closure to the scene. Some of the longer sketches were surprising in the number of interesting ideas that were included. I often found myself wondering ‘How many more twists can they squeeze out of this concept before it gets repetitive?’, but it rarely got to that point.
_The Consumption was a brilliant first effort at a festival show. They certainly had well honed sketch comedy chops that will have me looking out for their next effort.
Visit the Comedy Festival Website for booking details.