EDINBURGH 2013 - BWW Reviews: WARDENS, Assembly Roxy, August 11 2013
What happens when a group of traffic wardens, a PCSO and a chemist are forced to spend hours held up in a disused cricket pavilion held hostage by an angry mob? WARDENS, written by Darren Richman and Garrett Millerick, hopes to find out as it pokes fun at some of Britain's least-loved public servants.
The set-up seems great - a row over, for once, a correctly issued ticket results in riots to rival London 2011. But ultimately WARDENS can't quite get beyond obvious jokes and a worrying obsession with scatological humour.
It's well-acted, particular Thom Tuck as Martin, a chemist with childhood claim to fame who got holed up along with the uniformed group by mistake - his love for Lilt a particular highlight - and Paul Putner puts in an accomplished turn as the misanthropic senior warden. But ultimately the cast are severely let down by the material.
Traffic wardens are an easy target, and at times the writing sounds more like some recent fantasy of Eric Pickles than anything close to reality. We have jokes about confusing parking restrictions, ticket awarding league tables and how it breaks some kind of traffic warden code to be nice to motorists. We even get gags about PCSOs not being real police officers, surely a well of humour that has long since run dry. The running gag about an urgent need to go to the toilet seems more fitted to a sixth form revue than a professional production at the fringe.
WARDENS is one of those comedies you'd expect to find on ITV2 along with a confusingly raucous laughter track, mysteriously shunted into a graveyard slot on the schedules. With such talent it's a shame it can't be put to better use.
"WARDENS" runs until August 26th (not 13th) at 1530 at the Assembly Roxy
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