FestBuzz

Who: Idiots of Ants
Where: Pleas­ance Over the Road 2
When: 8.15pm, daily until 31st August 2009 (not 24th)
How Much: £8.50-£10

In 140 char­ac­ters or less: “The slick indie band of com­edy have noth­ing left to prove– except their identity.”

I knew I had noth­ing to fear in the capa­ble hands of pop­u­lar sketch group Idiots of Ants: these boys leave noth­ing to chance and their tim­ing is almost per­fectly sculpted. How­ever, as I looked down through the rail­ings in the venue (Pleas­ance Over the Road 2), the feel­ing of being removed from the per­for­mance was unavoid­able. With a strong use of mul­ti­me­dia (music stings, video, pho­tog­ra­phy and other audio-visual trick­ery) this does occa­sion­ally feel like watch­ing a show on TV. The boys have ami­able per­sonae and they are not with­out their oblig­a­tory young female fan base in the audience.

How­ever, not every­one is con­nect­ing with them.

Idiots of Ants’ sketches lib­er­ally ref­er­ence every­thing from sci fi to war films, from pop cul­ture to video games, though this some­times becomes a lit­tle unwieldy, with laughs from dif­fer­ent areas of the audi­ence at dif­fer­ent times. While this shows a broad range of appeal, it isn’t mas­sively cohe­sive and raises the ques­tion of who they are aim­ing their show at.

The strongest sketches lie in unpre­dictable moments: the video game sketch in par­tic­u­lar is a real treat, and the only point when the audi­ence inter­ac­tion really works. It also is invalu­able to see the boys riff­ing off each other in a slightly less rehearsed way. Though the thor­ough rehearsal and strong tim­ing can be appre­ci­ated the­atri­cally, the lack of abil­ity to come fully out of char­ac­ter and engage the audi­ence is what mars this oth­er­wise bril­liant performance.

This is a great hour of excel­lent enter­tain­ment, and it’s both visu­ally excit­ing and most impor­tantly funny. While the finale lacks a really good the punch­line, the energy level never drops and there’s never a lull in proceedings.

Every­one can hope to look for­ward to great things from Idiots of Ants: they are a tight knit group, and if they can just let their fans in a lit­tle bit more and let them find out who they really are, they could go stellar.

Fes­t­buzz Rating:

Words: Elise Bramich