Comedy: Colin Hoult’s Carnival of Monsters

Colin Hoult’s Carnival of Monsters

Comedy
****
Colin Hoult’s Carnival of Monsters
Pleasance Courtyard

The Pleasance Hut has a high capacity for a small venue, and what air conditioning it has is totally ineffectual – luckily, the discomfort lends itself perfectly to this comedy equivalent of a sharp kick to the head.  This isn’t so much a sketch show as a menagerie of ill-adjusted characters, “monsters” if you will, each given ample time and space to establish themselves and freak out the audience.

The strength of the show comes from its never letting up: the cast switch cleanly and frequently between high-energy rampage and a kind of poetic intimacy, but each scene and each character is as powerful and unnerving as the last. When invited to participate, the audience find it difficult to resist Hoult’s charm, though he doesn’t always treat them how they’d hoped – my only reservation is that the show is often a little too weird to appeal to all tastes.

ET