Edinburgh Fringe 2010
Boom Jennies: We Want Action!
The Boom Jennies
Genre: Comedy
Venue: The Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
The premise of this year’s show from the girls (and a boy) is that they are forming a protest group, meeting as often as they can in a tent (‘it’s not a tent, it’s a nerve centre’). We Want Action is something new from the Boom Jennies in that it’s not a collective of lots of different sketches – indeed, the posters proclaim We Want Action declare that this is a ‘comedy play’. In the end, it feels closer to a full length, extended sketch. That’s not a criticism; indeed this feels like the form of the sketch has been brought up to the next level.
Review
The characters are strong: In Amelia and Daphne, we see variations on the types of young women that have featured strongly in the BJ’s set before – uptight, romantic, and unavoidably passive-aggressive. In Kate, we have the sort of new-age young woman to be found in any university right now, managing to be both deeply sexy and profoundly annoying for essentially exactly the same reasons. And finally, in Martin, the new kid (and only boy) on the block, we have the kind of chap that would immediately have seen another meaning to the abbreviation BJ. Most crucially, these are characters who, while occasionally silly, and often self-absorbed, are ones that we’ve begun to genuinely care about by the time our hour is up.
