The Dog-Eared Collective - You're Amazing, Now Look At Me!

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There are plenty of shows at the Fringe that are badly thought through, under-rehearsed, under-written, or otherwise lacking in the kind of professionalism and commitment that a paying audience should expect. This isn’t one of them, and it’s hard to work out exactly why it fails,  so fundamentally, to make almost anyone in the audience laugh. But fail it does, to the extent that even the performers themselves repeatedly acknowledge this fact on stage.

Dog-Eared Collective have been together since 2005, garnering some impressive notices, and there’s no mistaking their commitment. There are enough beautifully made costumes and props brought out here to challenge a Mighty Boosh live show. The cast display an impressive range of comic accents and a relentless energy and enthusiasm. And most of their ideas seem like perfectly serviceable, surreal bases for decent sketches.

On a few occasions, this promise is realised: a parody of those twee adverts for ‘friendly’ banking is spot-on in style, technically impressive and has a fairly amusing, dark twist; and the denouement, in which “terrifying” women’s curling champion Rhona Martin directs the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Glasgow, culminating in the spectacular lighting of a chip pan fire, is topical and satisfyingly bonkers.

But all too often the sketches lack that crucial animating spark of inspiration to raise them above pedestrian-level wackiness. The silence from the audience is of the embarrassed variety, as the effort and self-belief of the performers is abundantly evident but, on this showing, ill-founded.