Review: The St Andrews Revue at the Fringe

The St Andrews Revue has received positive review after positive review in the comfy confines of our little, friendly hometown. But the Edinburgh Fringe is a whole other story. With […]


The St Andrews Revue has received positive review after positive review in the comfy confines of our little, friendly hometown. But the Edinburgh Fringe is a whole other story. With over 42,000 performances held over a month, the world’s largest arts festival attracts international audiences and vast numbers of comedy acts. The typical St Andrean humour of insulting the Kate Kennedy Club and imitating a hectic Friday night in Dervish just won’t fly here. Would the Revue’s first ever Fringe show manage to connect with a far tougher audience and still produce laughs?

The answer, simply, is yes. Instantly funny, naughty and engaging, the Revue’s wacky mix of impressions, music and sketches hit the mark 9 times out of 10, and was never far off. True, some of the jokes weren’t actually that funny; but the astonishing delivery was of such a high standard that that hardly mattered. Their performance carried the weaker material and allowed the stronger stuff to shine brilliantly.

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Right from the very start, the Revue made the most of St Andrews’ most famous export; Wills and Kate. Hilarious impressions of the Royal family surrounded the show, and the stage was littered with red, white and blue. This was a clever tactic, for it allowed the comedians to proudly display where they were from without falling into the trap of relying on St Andrews in-jokes. 2012 has shown that British monarchical patriotism is a widely-understood theme, and the Revue’s tapping into this was well-received.

That said, the show was extremely diverse, although it did predominantly focus on, and satirise, youth culture. Sexually-liberated dancing hipsters meeting in Tesco, girls singing about bicuriosity to the tune of Katy Perry, and the dangers of Facebook, scene after scene provided laughs. The danger with such specifically-targeted jokes is that older audience members get left behind, but they also showed the Revue to be fresh, energetic and in touch with modern life. It was also a relief to see that they chose not to play on the stereotype of St Andrews as an upper-class institution but, rather, at every opportunity mirthfully attacked any such pretension.

To be critical, many skits dragged on too long, stretching out jokes and including unfunny material. At times, too, the Revue seemed to give up humour altogether and the actors spent scenes shouting at one another in an unsuccessful search for laughs. A rapping skit, whilst hilarious in principle, was brought down by the rapping’s poor quality.

But these are small gripes, and are quickly forgiven. Ultimately, this show was dominated by quality and ran very smoothly from start to finish, helped along by excellently chosen interlude music. Picking the best sketch would be impossible. The Fringe is a big place; the St Andrews Revue, though, has proven itself to be just as big.