New Art Club: Feel About Your Body

I'm not entirely sure what I'm watching. Comedy duo Tom Roden and Pete Shenton are sorting out how we feel about our bodies. One-out-of-ten ratings are taken throughout the audience, sexy group dances ensue, audience members are pulled on stage, and stripteases (of both fake-out and full-frontal varieties) are performed.

It’s not quite sketch comedy, not quite standup, but a flurry of lewd, but somehow deeply good-natured comedy action, shaped very loosely around the idea of body image. Only in the show's last moments do we understand why we've (sort of) been investigating the strange pathos of the body. Shenton shares a story about a health scare which does indeed make society's hang-ups about our lumps and bumps seem trivial. If that's what they were going for. It's a little unclear.

Thankfully it doesn’t matter, because Shenton and Roden are so tremendously likeable that their audience sticks with them through interpretive dance, a reenactment of Roden's conversation with his own anus, and total, unheralded nudity. It may have behooved the pair to hint more overtly at Shenton's whammy of a story earlier on, giving us clueless audience members the promise of a coherent shape to the show's theme. But their dynamic with one another is so lovingly comfortable that the hour, however hastily structred, feels like hanging out with your two favourite friends. Your two favourite friends who really like to get their arses out.