Oyster Eyes: Keeping The Captain Warm

There is no sight that reassures you quite so much as venue staff laying out extra rows of seats. The show is oversold, the room is crammed full, and we are all in for one of the funniest hours of our lives.

Clad in matching yellow turtle necks and blue bumbags, Oyster Eyes look like they have fallen straight out of some kids’ TV channel from the 80s. In fact, a sketch on just that subject is one of the evening’s highlights.

Excellent acting and an innate comic intuition bring their sparkling observations and hilarious characters to life, taking the audience on a loop-the-loop helter-skelter of the surreal and the absurd.

Their real strength is in their ability to create characters we all recognise, and then give them the Oyster Eyes treatment, turning what is normal into what is absolutely weird. Their cutesy butter-wouldn’t-melt personas between sketches make their pin-sharp wit and insights all the better.

Though we journey through WonderWeaves, a self-obsessed girl, a desert frisson, CrapHam and DogEgg and a preacher and his wife, we never lose sight of the theme; four people looking for their mummy.

The final surprise ties everything together, and is perhaps the absolute highlight in a show full of highlights.