Norris & Parker: See You at the Gallows

One of the more intimate and intense performance spaces on the Fringe, the Attic is where the Pleasance often puts its late-night, high-energy oddball offerings, with the compelling Norris & Parker no exception. A sketchy character comedy duo, whose squabbling, sexual dysfunction around each other and members of the audience is invariably high in the mix of their skits, the leotard-sporting Katie Norris and Sinead Parker are backed on keyboard by Chris Thomson. Affecting a Victorian air of macabre as Christoph, he's the most manifest element of the duo's stated predilection for gallows humour.

Yet even given the ensemble's propensity for darkness, the overriding mood projected is of the inexplicable, for better and worse. Emerging initially as the Feminazis, these robot-like, Teutonic male castrators serve primarily to set up Norris as the superior, authority figure and Parker as the confused loose cannon, beneath even their harsh technician's contempt. As the misogynistic, eighties throwback DI Dick Cum Hardy, Norris is once again dominant, with Parker as his protesting female assistant, though they change it up for Parker's winning homage to punk poet John Cooper Clarke, inappropriately sticking it to The Man in a primary school.

Despite Thomson's solid support and wry asides, the musical pastiches of everything from Evita to Kate Bush don't really linger in the memory. And Hardy's investigation of Barry the Cannibal never coalesces into anything more than a heavy-handed spoof of blokeishness. Still, the singing voices and physical expressiveness are impressive and Norris and Parker's bickering outbusts rarely fail to raise a smile.