Recipient of a Moosehead development award and highly recommended for the Golden Gibbo Award at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Standard Double is a crowdpleaser, delivered wholeheartedly and with polish.
In this novel show, Kate McLennan and Wes Snelling take the ‘if only the walls had ears’ idea to imagine the various goings on between individuals within a standard hotel room – a standard double, to be precise. A host of characters, ranging from cleaners and hotel management to cancer patients, punters at a Pink concert, and a couple suffering bed death, come in and out of the performance space, and you never know what’s coming up next.
The show is actually performed in a room at The Blackman Hotel, so audiences are close to the performers, who are sharp and energetic. The stories are interwoven, with several characters recurring; it’s a lot like Little Britain – if you’re a fan of theirs, you’ll definitely enjoy Standard Double. Snelling and McLennan offer up a variety of idiosyncratic, more or less recognisable types rubbing up against each other with too-human frailty and lack of awareness; it’s a good-humoured show overall, with only a few horrible characters, and they get their come-uppances.
Abrasive hotel manager Cyndi becomes far too annoying and insane, and she’s over-used. The absurd unreality of her character doesn’t sit with the heightened but believable characters appearing in most of the rest of the skits. Another regular character, the put-upon Carl, is driven to distraction by Cyndi’s demands, resulting in bizarre, middle of the night appearance as he tries to carry out his instructions.
The moment where a hopeless TV talent contender and his mother enter the room after he’s been rejected yet again was, for me, the highlight of the night; Snelling’s silliness here is pants-wettingly hilarious. The developing romance between two cleaners is essentially the same sketch twice; they don’t really go anywhere.
The tone of Standard Double varies between poignant, more realistic moments and high camp, and the show can be uneven, although – even when the sketches become a little too sketchy and glib – there is still joy in the details.
One real pleasure is the idiomatic language – Snelling and McLennan are spot-on with their dialogue – and the more naturalistic characters are portrayed with affection. Interestingly, for a comedy show, the more serious and emotional scenes sometimes work best – as daft and superficial as broken-hearted gay Trevor is, Snelling allows him a believable grief; another sad moment between a devoted husband and his wife makes for true poignancy. The reactions of the put-upon friend on the receiving end of unwanted lesbian attention after a Pink concert is an uncomfortable experience, McLennan’s friend appearing rather small and defenceless against Snelling’s large and pushy Ange. These moments seem to suggest that Snelling and McLennan could happily go deeper with their stories, rather than aiming for the comedic middle ground.
That said, Double Standard deserves its accolades and is a heap of fun to warm you up on a winter’s night.
Rating: 3 ¼ stars out of 5
Standard Double
Written and performed by Wes Snelling and Kate McLennan
Directed by Mark Watson
The Blackman Hotel, Melbourne
9 – 20 July
