Brighton Fringe 2026
Wrap Party
You Guys Productions
Genre: character comedy, Theatre
Venue: The Lantern @ ACT
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Wrap Party lifts the hatch on life behind a film-set catering van. Harry and Ollie are lifelong friends and working-class caterers, trying to survive one last chaotic service before the wrap party begins. As A-list egos flare, inspections loom and impossible coffee orders stack up, their tiny van becomes a pressure cooker. Multi-rolled by two performers, the show blurs the line between performance and reality as Harry clings to the business he’s built, while Ollie dreams of escaping catering for an acting career that always feels just out of reach.
Review
Harry Petty’s script, devised and worked on with Harry Warren and Ollie Hart, depicts a catering stall on a big film. It’s maybe a quarter stand up, three quarters play, but always comic.The show is based on their experiences working in catering on a film set and while a lot of the humour comes from caricature you sense there is a vein of truth in even the most outrageous events. Intricate and very specific coffee orders just after you have closed up from the director’s PA are the rule of the day, the exploitation of those in low level jobs for the well being of those in “higher level” places.
The relationship between the two central characters, Harry played by Harry Warren and Ollie played by Ollie Hart, is simple in one way – they’re mates, but complicated in that Harry owns the stall and Ollie works for him. Add a dodgy generator, a very keen job’s worth catering safety inspector, a flamboyant PA, a famous actor, an important director. All the parts are played by Ollie and Harry so there is much fast change between characters and accents and costumes which could be a bit confusing to follow at times. Ollie Hart (the actor!) had a lovely preening, long necked presentation of the catering inspector which identified her immediately. The over-the-top but just as put upon PA (Harry Warren) was immediately recognisable in pink sun glasses, other characters were less defined at times – I was never quite sure when the famous actor appeared.
There’s quite a complicated set of plot strands involving Harry’s ex, psychedelic mushrooms, the safety officer’s romance, a failing generator and more. But the jokes and one liners and character interactions keep on coming, nicely delivered. The director, hilariously high on the wrong mushrooms bizarrely offers Olly an audition, more realistically he offers the catering van a permanent job on his next film, or says “why don’t you come and be my personal chef” in that perfectly observed condescending cringe worthy manner that important people express their (momentary) affection for those below them. This combination of anger and humour is a potent part of the production.
Where it works it’s very funny – some of the set pieces like the director’s speech transcended being just a pastiche of a director and became a pastiche of every captain of industry or CEO who is very self satisfied with what they have created. The subplot of Harry’s broken relationship and Olly’s ambitions are not so convincing – the production is playing for laughs but also going for pathos at the same time and it does feel a bit forced.
The audience enjoys it, there are chuckles and guffaws in the right places. You can see that the piece has been honed in performance, there’s no doubting the comic timing and prowess of the actors, but I felt it needed more work on making the characters more physically defined, more instantly recognisable.
