Guilt and Shame

Robert Cawsey and Gabriel Bisset-Smith set out to explore our innermost guilt through an hour of titting about which, though often reasonably diverting and a welcome alternative to the po-faced university sketch comedy that so plagues the Fringe, in the end feels unsatisfying and underdeveloped.

With speed-induced manic dance-offs and more than a dash of comedy cocksucking, this is mostly good, unclean fun but the pair do let it all run away from them on several occasions. The entirely excusable puerility often segues into downright offensiveness, and even this mostly up-for-it 11pm Underbelly crowd draws back when it is suggested that Aids is God's way of wiping out gay men. 

The device used to introduce each sketch—a smartphone app which supposedly reads audience members' innermost guilty thoughts (actually just pre-recorded bits played by the tech)—makes the show feel very pre-packaged and trotted-out. Each sketch is bolted on awkwardly to this central and faintly bogus theme, so both making the concept seem ramshackle and denying the sketches the organic feel they might otherwise have had.

There is some genuinely clever stuff here but it's thrown in carelessly and sinks amid the tide of inanity. One can't help think that Cawsey and Bisset-Smith—each with an impressively long credits list and a number of awards for their writing and directing—have sculpted their act to match what they percieve to be the demands of a late-night Fringe audience. They've done themselves a huge disservice in the process.