Headspinningly metatheatrical sketch troupe Sheeps’ wonderfully-named tenth-year anniversary Edinburgh Fringe retrospective show ‘Ten Years, Ten Laughs’ isn’t quite what it purports to be. For starters, this is their twelfth year at the Fringe. And while it does mostly reprise material from their old shows – notably 2018’s ‘Live and Loud Selfie Sex Harry Potter’ – that’s not the whole story.
Daran Johnson, Liam Williams and Alastair Roberts are too mischievous to simply do a straight greatest hits show, and it’s obvious something’s up when they immediately seek to assure us that they will definitely be performing their viral lockdown web hit ‘Three Cowboys on the Range’.
I won’t spoiler where the show goes with this. But let’s just say it’s very understandable if you’ve not heard of the sketch, and its eventual, sublimely high-concept deployment makes for a tremendous climax, possibly their finest moment to date, and a sure sign that Sheeps still have ‘it’.
Whether or not they want to do anything more with ‘it’ is TBC.
Is a retrospective – one that cribs a lot of its structure from its predecessor – a cop-out, speaking of the fact that its creators have moved on with their individual careers to the point that thrashing out a full new hour seems unlikely?
Or is it a well-earned look back, that’ll be playing to audiences to whom the material is either new or a welcome reprise?
Potentially both of those things are true. But whether ‘Ten Years…’ proves to be a swan song or a stocktake, it’s extremely funny.
It loosely follows the same outline as ‘Live and Loud…’, presenting the three men as having grown apart in the years since they were last at the Fringe, now reconvening for one last, possibly ill-judged roll of the dice.
Sheeps are presented as a needy, jaded, desperately fragile group of men, at each other’s throats over minor deviations from old scripts, chafing over being made to perform roles they don’t like. And yet rather than a window dressingy conceit, the bickering is baked into the metatheatrical DNA of the show – all of their arguments and rows spin off in wild directions that prove to be the substance of the sketches.
It’s not what you’d call profound or hard-hitting, though their skit about the citizens of bombed-out Aleppo being incredibly sympathetic to Britain’s hostile refugee policy has some real bite to it. But it is brilliantly crafted: usually, working out how they set up a joke effectively is the joke.
Will this be Sheeps’ last show at the Fringe? It’s possible. But I hope not. Here’s to ten more laughs.