The Win Bin

When is a joke properly funny but also slightly terrifying? When you only have to scratch a little below the surface to see where the laughter stops and reality begins. That’s the sensation you get watching this gloriously imaginative new comedy from Kate Kennedy and Sara Joyce, who return to the Old Red Lion Theatre after their Beckett Trilogy earlier this year.

‘The Win Bin’ is about the application for the last paid job in the arts. Ever. How do you decide who gets it? You make desperate people compete! So, judged by Bench, an invisible Big Brother-type figure, Bash (Kennedy), a comic-book artist, has to play against a taxidermist, a choreographer, a photographer, a writer and a crafter in 12 hours of increasingly humiliating and absurd tests.

Kennedy and Joyce cram the show with hilarious satirical broadsides against everything from funding application forms to ‘jobs’ that only pay expenses and – if you’re lucky – travel as well. This is a production unapologetically aimed at uni graduates entering a world of endless hoop-jumping and projected 40 percent funding cuts.

Towards the middle, it feels more like a sketch show. And a ‘was it all a dream?’-style framing device complicates the simplicity of the scenario. But the wit coursing through ‘The Win Bin’s veins more than keeps this production afloat. As directed by Joyce, it’s fleet-footed comedy with a frontline feel, a funhouse pace and a gimlet eye.

And in Kennedy, who plays Bash and several more characters, you get someone with incredible comic prowess. Whether she’s wincingly miming extracting her own tooth or manically inventing a sob story to curry favour, she’s just breathlessly good. And Wilf Scolding, who takes on the other roles, gives us a beautifully realised handful of misfits. Basically, strap yourself in and expect your ribs to hurt.