The show ‘Style Over Substance – A 10 year Retro-Speculative’ had me laughing out loud from the off. Never has a trip down memory lane been so funny. The comedy is instant. Fuelled by a need to entertain to please an audience that were within minutes lapping it up. This is witty clever stuff, empathy tinged with apathy. A social comment that is both bewitching to watch and also comes across as a slight curiosity. This double act play off each other superbly and their skills as songwriters is magnificent. Two cases in particular: their songs Everyone Is At A Chem Sex party But Me and British Values, a wondrous examination of class, the haves and the have nots and all the traits that being a Brit means. Satire and sarcasm, a fab combination and the irony that formed part of the 75 minutes running time proved beyond a doubt their enormous and ferocious skills to put on a show come so naturally.
Even when they broke to allow for a costume change and introduced Ginger Johnson to do a couple of numbers, the magic was not broken. I have to give this show a thunderous thumbs up. Bourgeois by name and perhaps by nature but guess what? This fellow middle class person with perceived materialistic values and conventional attitudes agreed with everything they said, and felt very proud of it. I am as they are also. Comedy fired off with the speed of a bullet being shot from a well aimed pistol.
****
Style Over Substance – A 10 year Retro-Speculative runs to the 26th August at Soho Theatre. sohotheatre.com. Box office 020 7478 0100.
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