Review: The Big Bite-Size Breakfast Show, Pleasance Dome (Venue 23)

There must be few better-value breakfasts in Edinburgh during August, with refreshments served beforehand and three rotating bills of short comic plays being performed from day to day.

* * *

This review is based on “Menu 2”, entitled Life, Sex and Death, and it was a mixed bag of work – but that the range fell somewhere between fairly amusing and downright hilarious is a good recommendation of the quality on offer.

These ensemble pieces are too long and involved to file under sketch comedy and too short to really get under their characters’ skin, leaving the ones with the best gags to stand tallest.

A physical piece dedicated to the smoking of cigarettes is a quirky opener and a short about two women staking out one’s ex-husband and the other’s lover (the same man) is gently amusing, but there are some real gems here: a very well-realised piece about a blind date between a man, a woman and their inner monologues, and a frankly excellent, astutely-observed highlight featuring a London commuter treating her Tube journey as if it were a finely-timed contest, eyeing the pregnant woman suspiciously and bemoaning the fact “some old soak or a crack’ead or a teacher” has chosen this morning to end it all under the wheels of a train.

Until tomorrow. Today 10:30am.