The Sunset Five

Too many disparate elements mar an otherwise funny show in DugOut Theatre’s casino heist parody. When a local property magnate threatens the closure of quaint seaside pub The Sunset, its loyal quiz team realise that their only option is to rob a casino. 

Narration is provided by quizmaster Luke Murphy in best American western style, with guitar twangs to boot. There’s plenty more live music, including drum pads and loop machines. The team enjoy playing with their loop machine on stage to build different scenes, but the slow accumulation of recordings and loops deadens the pace and the montage scenes don’t add much to the piece as a whole.

So many ideas are crammed into the show. Not only is there a pub quiz style framing device, with each scene a different round, but then the loops and live music, the casino, the heist plot, the Vegas elements…it’s all a bit much and all a bit loosely strung together.

Tom Black and Sadie Spencer’s wordplay-filled script is often very funny, a mashup not only of every movie it can squeeze in but the parodies of those movies too. The seriousness of American blockbusters is transposed to a little English village, with a bit of Cornetto trilogy, a bit of Wallace and Gromit, a lot of Tarantino and a lot of Fry and Laurie. Clever, certainly, but convoluted too.