The Past - Friesian Underbelly Bristo Square - Review

What do you get when you combine two actors with several moments in history, high levels of audience participation and even higher levels of silliness? You get The Past, an hilarious whistle stop tour through history  from Cleopatra and the Christmas Football match in no man’s land, to Henry VIII and cavemen. Sean Wareing and Freddie Walker of the Fishing4Chips theatre company don victorian style striped bathing suits and rattle through sketch after sketch, flying with momentum and powered by the endless laughs of the delighted audience.

Breaking away from their full length historical comedy Burning Down The Horse, which plays before in the same venue, Wareing and Walker squeeze over 20 snapshot sketches into a whirlwind hour that never feels rushed and in fact keeps the audience wonderfully engaged throughout. The jokes come so quickly that the punchlines land perfectly before the action jumps into another time period, and the audience are given just enough of each sketch to get the laugh and launch into the next.

Whilst, for the most part, each sketch feels entirely different from the last jumping backwards and forwards in time (this isn’t a chronological order thing), some recurring jokes give us a wonderful sense of getting to know some characters more than others such as the HR manager who can’t understand why their workers are building certain moments and two friends playing ball by the Berlin Wall.

Walker and Wareing are such likeable performers who show off their spot on comedic timing and natural ability to both work with and completely immerse an audience in the action. From the very beginning, the audience is utterly on board and delighted to be involved, no matter how bonkers it gets. From stepping in as marriage counsellors to helping Cleopatra find the milk for her bath, the audience is on board, a sign that Walker and Wareing create a welcoming and comfortable space where people can let down their guard and join in with the fun.

The Past is a production that will have you laughing from start to end, wishing that it could go on and on. It’s silly and fast paced, yet cleverly crafted in a way that everything flows and never jarring as we rattle through time in this masterclass of comedy.