Holes by Tom Basden

We’re not going to give away the “secret location” of Holes by Tom Basden, save to say that you’ll need to ring-fence the best part of four hours in your congested Fringe diary for the round-trip. It’s one of the more impressively-staged festival destinations, though: a two-tiered, in-the-round audience circling a lofted, sand-filled stage crowned by a huge sun, whose fiery glare gradually warms our four actors to boiling point.

A BA passenger plane bound for Sydney has crash-landed on a remote island. A quartet of survivors include Gus, Marie and Ian, all colleagues from the same inane corporation; and Erin, a teenager. How did it happen? And can the group coalesce to stay alive?

There’s plenty to enjoy in the early exchanges as Basden/the cast exercise their comic chops via wildly polarised reactions to their predicament, or another “transport cock-up”, as Marie chirpily observes. Indeed, Basden sure can drop a knuckleheaded, crowd-pleasing punchline (“there are no such things as lesbians, they’re just trying to be clever”, insists Ian), but as the wheels come off for the dysfunctional foursome, the mid-section sags under the weight of excessive Four Pints of Lager…-esque barroom banter.

Even when the screwball comedy subsides and Holes… changes tack, that off-the-shelf desert island plot device resolves itself in sub-William Golding territory with a bit of whimper.

As a series of episodic encounters, Holes… is admittedly great fun, abetted by a uniformly strong cast, clearly enjoying their broadly drawn characters; as a complete piece of drama, though, it’s just a little lost at sea.