Lame humour of the Wild West

THEATRE The Real Wild West Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh At Tron Theatre, Glasgow, June 24 and touring Jings! The Fringe hasn't even started and the panto has passed through Edinburgh like a dose of salts. Midway through a toon hall tour schedule that would only fit on an XXL T-shirt, Mull Theatre bring their breezy brand of populist entertainment to the studio at the Traverse, which is used to rather more serious fare. Even so, we laugh. Some of us, some of the time.

Sample joke: Are you a call girl? No, but my auntie's from Tiree. That's Hebrides humour, apparently. How about this: why don't midges bite the locals? Because they're all Scot gnats. It's no surprise the script writer David Cosgrove supplies the gags for Wheel of Fortune.

The Real Wild West is billed as A Complete and Utter History of the West (of Scotland) packed into two hours with an interval. We start with the Picts and end with the internet, via Bobby the Bruce played as an Italian-American mobster. Why? Because Italian-American mobsters are pretty easy to do.

Despite the loose concept of a whistlestop tour through Scottish history, The Real Wild West is more like a series of loosely linked sketches. Think of the Reduced Shakespeare company, as imagined by DC Thomson. The performances are strong, but the problem with this kind of so-called "Scottish" humour is that it's a generic, call-and- response affair that prefers familiarity over surprise every time.

Eddie Gibb

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