WitTank

WitTank

28 July, 2009
by: Emma

I'm not sure what kind of audience numbers I expect to attend a Sunday night sketch gig but I certainly don't expect people repeatedly going up to the Etcetera theatre door to check if the show has opened and chomping at the bit when they're told it's not open yet. Word has clearly got out about WitTank, a sketch group of Durham graduates consisting of Naz Osmanoglu, Mark Cooper-Jones, Kieran Boyd and Guy Corbett. They've performed at Edinburgh for the last three years but have had a couple of cast changes and tonight is a preview of their debut as a four-man team.

Being the smallest theatre in London, the Etcetera is a venue that needs a packed room and we certainly get one tonight. The group bound on, introduce themselves and shake hands with a few people in the front row - just enough to establish a connection but not enough to make anyone nervous. The first sketch is a mixture of the surreal and the everyday, a business meeting gone wrong after a gremlin eats a Japanese client. It isn't that the idea for this scene is particularly funny but what immediately stands out is the wonderfully comic acting skills of Naz Osmanoglu, who manages to contort his face and whisper to his 'colleagues' with such distressed vehemence that all the audience is chuckling away from the off.

It's still hard to guess where the show will go from here; a dodgy follow-up sketch about a bloke helping his friend artificially inseminate someone doesn't bode well. After this however, the group go from strength to strength. Mark Cooper-Jones and Kieran Boyd perform a great piece in the style of Chris Morris about a kid who gets addicted to learning and has to move off Geography to 'harder stuff' like English Lit. There are modern day references to ridiculous inventions like Heinz Baked Beans and Ikea, reminding us quite how rubbish they are. There is a historical sketch about Nelson's last words to Hardy (a lot more suggestive than 'kiss me' it turns out) and a surreal Indiana Jones style gauntlet scene in Tescos after a bloke simply asks for help with his packing. In short, there's all kinds of ideas going on here but they flow together well and there's certainly no dithering about.

The group clearly know how to play to their strengths. Osmanoglu is the consummate clown, taking the lead in roles that call for drama from the Jim Carrey school of acting. He shines as Nelson, seemingly 'ad-libbing' his lines to the point that he has the rest of the cast corpsing; as Mr Ju-Ju - the Boogeyman who never sleeps and as a paranoid guy afflicted with a claw-hand deformity. Straighter roles like the everyman and the deadpan newsreader are performed with aplomb by Guy Corbett and Kieran Boyd, balancing the show out nicely.

There are a few sketches that could do with some fine-tuning - like the happy family breakfast scene, perfectly set up for some twisted bathos but sloppily finished with an unexplained sudden death ending. That said, it was a lot more hit than miss, with an inclination towards the dark, the silly and the satirical. The group now head to Edinburgh to perform the show at the Fringe and it will be interesting to see how well it is recieved there. I for one will be first in line to see their next one.

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Emma