This venue is a hub of comedy lurking in the quiet of little Venice. Its productions, however, are anything but lurking. Fat Beast’s latest offering by Andrew Doyle is an ‘in your face’, no holds barred feast of brash and wickedly funny comedy.

Shamlet is one man’s quest to steal Shakespeare’s lost plays from entombment with the bard at Stratford-Upon-Avon, while using a sorry collection of no-hoper, washed-up actors to front his scheme. The characterisations are brilliantly stereotypical and played up to the full by the energetic cast. From the overtly camp and lovable duo Neil (Chris Vincent), who shows particular flair with his physicality and delivery indicative of a young Rik Mayall, and Isambard (Oliver Burton), to the inquisitive, easily shockable nun Bernadette, played by Julia Williams, and Louis Brownhill’s slow, ironically named Dervish.

The dialogue is slick, peppered with one-liners and the odd unavoidable groaner. The entire cast drive the performance along and even the introspective regret of producer / grave robber Marcus (Dan Morgan) does little to quell the pace as the production within the production hurtles to its shambolic conclusion, Maureen Younger’s Joan doing nothing to avert the crisis, fuelling bickering with her single-minded lovey approach.

Shamlet certainly is an accurate description of the storyline but could not be further from the whole of this show – top-flight fringe comedy.

ROB SPEIGHT