Sound & Fury's Doc Faustus

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The self-described "vaudeville-nouveau" trio Sound & Fury have brought their latest lit-parody to the Fringe comedy circuit. Its three American members, Patrick Hercamp, Richard Maritzer, and Ryan Adam Wells, take us on a journey to the Old West via their particular brand of comedy: a sort of interactive standup where the energy we put in is the energy we'll get back. We know this because they explicitly tell us this at the start of the show.

You don't have to look far to find Fringe comedians who masterfully work their innate nerdiness into something fully formed and perhaps even structurally elegant (Nick Mohammed, Mark Watson, Helen Arney). Sadly, none of that artfulness can be found here. Though wrapped around the structure of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, the show descends into a sort of hodge-podge of lazy puns and topical jokes – a stream of consciousness put into a script that doesn't allow for the kind of extemporaneous comedy moments that the trio are clearly gifted in. It's when these three buddies are interacting, exhibiting their American theatre geek (or simply geek geek) charm that the audience is fantastically engaged. But Hercamp, Maritzer, and Wells come across as your friendly, Family Guy-quoting, anime evangelist neighbours down the hall – the ones you genuinely like, but whose puns are, sadly, so bad they're just bad.

While they've got the physical comedy down cold, and deliver some genuinely well-worked, intelligent comic moments (a much foreshadowed "racist scene" that never totally materialises), casual Doctor Who semi-jokes and that preamble on the importance of audience participation make us wonder exactly who they think their audience is.