Cambridge Arts Theatre, Cambridge – until Saturday 23 October 2021
Reviewed by Steph Lott
5*****
‘Groan Ups’ is the latest offering from Mischief (the company that brought us gems such as The Play That Goes Wrong and The Comedy about a Bank Robbery). It’s the story of a group of five friends and follows them from primary school to adulthood.
Written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, the show starts with the voices of 2 teachers speaking to the audience as if they were school pupils. Then the 5 main characters come bundling on to the stage: Archie (Daniel Abbott), Simon (Matt Cavendish), Moon (Yolanda Ovide), Spencer (Dharmesh Patel) and Katie (Lauren Samuels). They are part of a year 2 class and they play a game to set the scene of the play which introduces the 5 children.
The opening of the play is a bit confusing as you try and work out who is who, amongst various references to the parents of each of the characters in the play. But it gets steadily better once you get the hang of this as the adult actors play a group of naughty 6-year-olds. There was toilet humour and a lot of laugh-out-loud moments, and the audience very soon were happy to be transported along with the story. I suppose the opening sequence in which the class make an inadvertently smutty presentation about their weekends is a bit “ooer missus” but judging from the sniggering going on around me, the rest of the audience were not averse to a bit of smutty innuendo!
All the scenes take place in a primary school classroom and I absolutely loved the changing size of the chairs and the height of the doors as the children grew older in each scene.
The performers in Kirsty Patrick Ward’s production are all very engaging. We see them change from unruly kids, to typical teenagers, through to young adults at a school reunion, each act becoming stronger as they become older and we get to know them. I particularly enjoyed Dharmesh Patel’s performance as the bright, mischievous trouble-maker Spencer who steals Smarties from the teacher’s desk. I’m not sure how many hamsters met their unfortunate ends at his hand! However it was Jamie Birkett in her dual roles as Chemise/Miss Murray who stole the show for me. Her face and her timing had me and the rest of the audience in absolute stitches! There was some excellent running gags in the show which I won’t repeat for fear of spoiling them but who knew hamsters could have so many names?!
Overall, Groan Ups was a bit clunky at the start but as the characters grew up and the story began to flow as it progressed through the scenes, it quickly grew on me too. If you’re after a laugh-a-minute show densely packed with jokes, witticisms and visual humour, this is the one to go and see. It’s a mix of the funny, the charming, the sad and the painful. But isn’t that true of growing up?