Office Hours - Quick review

This is a series of six bright, quirky sketches all of which are enacted in different, upmarket offices in a central city block. Some of the brief plots rely upon the wacky situation for the comedy; the others are more dialogue based. Each hilarious tale has two or three actors, so there are about a dozen very different and interesting characters, wonderfully portrayed by the talented cast of well-known faces.

The stories are subtly linked, and in the final extremely funny and outrageous piece, the storylines come together.

Thankfully the director (Susan Lynch) has chosen to play the characters straight rather than caricatured. With their normal, everyday conversation style of delivery, the humour is even more bizarre. This approach gives a wonderful freshness and belief in the individuals. When stories are short – most were 12 minutes - it is very difficult to get the audience informed as to the situation and to believe the personalities, however this worked beautifully in this show.

The acting standard was well above average and the whole cast delivered their punch lines skilfully. As they all worked majestically as a team, it may be a little unfair to single out Peter Bloor (with his laugh of the night – an extremely topical aside), Judy Pinnock and Nicola Bond as outstanding.

A quality set which, after an extremely brief closing of the curtain, reopened every time to reveal another convincingly different office theme and decor. Slick work by the stage team.

Booking is advisable, as even on the Monday night it was a full house! Some of the audience were back for a second time.

Quite a few belly laughs.