Comedy review: The Kagools: Tutti

Edinburgh Festival Fringe: Winners of this year's Amused Moose Comedy Award for 'relatively unknown performers', The Kagools are a likeable if lightweight mime double-act who rely heavily on audience participation and music-cued slapstick, their stage antics augmented by a giant screen and pre-recorded video.

Just the Tonic at The Caves (Venue 88)

***

Dressed in their eponymous cagoules, Claire Ford and Nicola Wilkinson affect a bravado display of wordless dancing, squabbling with each other and wide-eyed flirting with men in the front rows. Two principal factors inspire their sketches. A toy unicorn at the side of the stage introduces magical possibilities with the malevolent chuckle of a capricious deity. And the Kagools’ fondness for water-based tomfoolery, which leads to supersoaker shootouts, a recurring Baywatch-spoof and their signature skit, in which they affect to be submerged in a water tank, arms, legs and torsos popping up and out of the video into the here and now of their cave venue.

The problem is that the energy, and by extension the knockabout comedy, often seems propelled by the soundtrack of familiar tunes rather than deriving organically from their humour, with the action lagging whenever one of their marks don’t quite intuit what’s required of them. Still, Tutti is a lively, undemanding romp.

Until tomorrow. Today 5:15pm.