Review: Birdbrained at The Library, Woodhouse

“…a show with a zany heart and a love for the absurd…”

Birdbrained by Sketchy Gooses at The Library, Woodhouse, Leeds

By Sean Sable

My formative teenage years were marked by a near bacchanal of bootleg videos. I knew all the good dealers in grubby grey-market VHS tapes of things you simply could not find on terrestrial TV. From Hong Kong kung fu to hard-to-find horror classics like The Unnamable II, I owe much of my adolescence to car boot finds that may or may not have matched the promise of the slipcase. One of my favourite things to dig out of those busted-up cardboard boxes was sketch comedy. Whether it was a Canadian show like The Kids in the Hall or a US find like The State or In Living Color, I considered it my duty to get my hands on every bit of sketch comedy going. The reward for my efforts was getting to know upcoming comedians long before my friends had a chance to meet them in movies or TV. Whilst everyone I knew saw Wayne and Garth for the first time in Wayne’s World, they were already old friends to me—thanks to my bootleg SNL tapes. So, when I was invited to watch Birdbrained, the new sketch comedy show from The Sketchy Gooses at The Library in Woodhouse Leeds, I was intrigued by the chance to see if I could get a glimpse of the next Molly Shannon or Jim Carrey.

Birdbrained is a preview of The Sketchy Gooses’ Edinburgh Fringe run, staged as part of the inaugural Yorkshire Fringe, a new festival built to give the county’s homegrown talent a platform before August’s madness takes over. The Leeds troupe have spent the past year or so building a following at small venues around the city, and last night’s full house suggested that word has been getting around. The hour ambles through a run of sketches, among them a wrestling match between the Pope and the Devil, a pun-stuffed Frankenstein’s rogue one-out-of-ten dentist, and a disgraced fifth Teletubby hauled before two BBC executives, broken up by a pair of musical interludes. It is light and irreverent, occasionally dipping into the absurd and the surreal.

One of the best early sketches involved a group of chain-blowing “smokers” addicted to children’s party horns that had the audience howling. Later, Lizzie’s turn as a therapist with very unusual advice had a deadpan ending that left me with the giggles. Rebecca was especially strong as the Teletubby producer in the night’s funniest bit. Francesca’s musical interlude showed real ability. It was a twangy, folk-inflected number steeped in blue humour and sung in a sickly-sweet southern drawl over confident guitar work. The whole cast’s accent work was excellent, allowing the performers to keep their transformations quick (when they weren’t all putting on nurse’s outfits) and light. The sketch length was economical across the board, with nothing allowed to stick around long enough that it sagged.

The show is a work in progress—a preview evening as they prep for Edinburgh Fringe in a few weeks. As such, it had a few growing pains. Whilst many of the sketches had good moments individually, the programme struggled with shape and dynamics. Not enough tied one sketch to the next: no callbacks, no running jokes, nothing that let an idea build across the hour rather than simply end and restart from zero with each bit. Many sketches followed a similar rhythm: a hook-y premise followed by a climb of puns towards a sting. Because of this, the format itself left little scope for surprise, however fun an individual idea might be. Some of the front-loaded sketches were too loose to build early momentum, suggesting the group has more work to do to develop a clear sense of where its best material lies. Occasional weak projection blunted lines before they reached the back.

Birdbrained is a show with a zany heart and a love for the absurd by a local comedy troupe with big aspirations. Nine out of ten undead dentists agree that you should check it out.

Sketchy Goose plays at The Library, Woodhouse, Leeds on Saturday 11 July.

Sean Sable is a Yorkshire-based freelance writer and editor specialising in Young Adult and Horror fiction, frequently at the same time. When she isn’t buried under a pile of books and manuscripts, she is looking for her keys and having extensive one-sided conversations, in Swedish, with her deaf cat. You can find her online at: www.seansable.co.uk