By Ollie Cochran
Even if you have never heard of the Durham Revue, you most likely have heard from them. Modern-day British comedy has an odd habit of churning out, ad nauseam, future stars from a single sketch comedy troupe in the North East. Ed Gamble, Nish Kumar, and Stevie Martin – all ex-Taskmaster contestants, yes, but also esteemed alumni of the Revue. Add in Jeremy Vine and Ambika Mod for a smattering of extra sweetness, and you have yourself a tasty dessert made entirely of successful comedians, whipped up by Durham’s premier sketch troupe.
Founded in 1974, the Revue have put together a troupe of writer/performers for the last 52 years that form a tight-knit group, developing and finetuning sketch material throughout the year before a month-long run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. A place in the troupe is hard to come by: they operate an annual three-round audition process, assessing not only candidates’ skill at performing comedy, but also writing it. And with only seven or eight troupe members every year – and only five or six of them as performers – it is an illustrious gig within the student theatre scene.
It was with all this in mind that I headed to the Collingwood Arts Centre on Sunday the 18th January to catch the Revue’s first show of the year: A Day at the Durham ReZoo. Co-president duo Samuel Bentley and Jude Battersby open the show to sinister music, recounting the aftermath of their Fringe run last year: critical acclaim (the troupe’s Derek Award on full display), but a bank balance that suggests otherwise. The solution? The troupe are now working as part-time zookeepers to get some extra cash. Makes sense.
Cue the introductions. Bentley and Battersby return alongside Alice Barr and Nat Pryke, joined on stage by newcomers Ollie Painter, Miranda Pharaoh and Bea Pescott-Khan, with Isaac Slater joining Pryke as a writer. In typical Revue style, they introduce themselves one-by-one, displaying a touch of their individual comedic styles, before Battersby rousingly instructs us to give them a big round of applause after every sketch, whether they “deserve it or not”. Before the sketches even begin, I am struck by the troupe’s rapport; for their first show, they seem immensely comfortable together, and the humorous asides and awkward interjections are a testament to their tight-knit quality.
And the sketches are no different. Battersby and Bentley have electrifying chemistry, the former’s energetic facial expressions and command of physical comedy complementing the latter’s supremely dry wit and fantastic control of comic timing. This was on full display in one of the night’s standout sketches – a humorous take on ‘Noah’s Ark’ which provides several laugh-out-loud moments from the duo’s antithetical dynamic before the gag even lands. Together they also parody the randomness of the term “knee-slapper” in a sketch full of dad jokes that pits homoeroticism against maternal resurrection.
Likewise, in a sketch that satirises drama teachers taking a school production all too seriously, Bentley pairs well with Painter. The production in question: Beckett’s classic Waiting for Godot – here, performed by their Year 3 class. It is a sketch that drives forward with its joke from the beginning, each comment funnier than the next. Painter, throughout the evening, is fantastic with his naturalistic approach, his delivery uncompromisingly measured to extract full comedic punch.
Alice Barr has some excellent intensity throughout and great diction – her lively characters in ‘Parakeet’ and ‘Gender Reveal Party’ are among the highlights of sketches where the gags don’t always land. Her best moment of the night is in the ‘Ides of March’ sketch where Caesar and his (ex)comrades are transposed into the modern world on a ‘girlies’ night; Barr’s commitment and characterisation are sustained brilliantly. Pharaoh is equally good here as Brutus, delivering one of the central one-liners, “You know you’re my ride… or die”, fabulously.
Indeed, Pharaoh establishes herself as a talented performer – balancing sombre, dry delivery with self-aware wit. She is part of some of the evening’s more experimental sketches, exhibiting a masterful command of awkward humour in a meta sketch where she gets stage fright and messes up her line as she sits in a hot tub and in a particularly peculiar anti-joke vignette involving a glass of milkshake (or is it Gaviscon?).
Bea Pescott-Khan has some similarly memorable moments: as prisoner 24602 in a Les Miserablés parody that delighted the theatre-loving audience, she is fabulously quippy and utterly deadpan, ensuring that the momentum of the joke resounds throughout; whilst in one of the evening’s simplest, but best sketches involving a forgetful goldfish instructor, her wit is razor-sharp – a notable gag despite its brevity.
Some other highlights include Battersby dropping a rhyming Lin-Manuel Miranda – (malfunctioning) fake goatee and all – into the Chernobyl disaster and letting the cultural mismatch deal the comedic punches, and a succinct homophonic gag involving not ‘Mock the Week’ but ‘Mock the Weak’.
Still, it doesn’t all work. Painter’s deliberate, faux-sincere delivery of a sermon whilst chomping down on corn doesn’t quite land (though his corpsing does provide some entertainment – it is as if he feels as silly as he looks), nor does a sketch involving a doctor’s checkup where the patient has soiled himself, a premise that outstays its welcome long before the punchline does. At times, diction falters, even in the contained venue; the impact of sketches involving wordplay or quick delivery, therefore, is diminished.
On the whole, many of the sketches are just too long – though, I concede, it is best to trial their material in this context before some of the upcoming shows. But look, as a first show, this is an immense achievement for the new troupe. (A special mention, of course, must go to Pryke and Slater for their writing achievements, despite not being featured on stage.) The Revue are clearly veering off in new directions this year, developing sketches in the realm of the absurd or abstract – eager to diverge some of their material from their orthodox gags.
“Last year, at Edinburgh, we maybe got a bit of criticism for playing some of our comedy a little bit safe,” remarks Bentley, chatting to me after the show. “I think we wanted to include stuff here that started working towards a creativity that appealed to that kind of comedy-going crowd that you see in Edinburgh.” I agree with him. But for student sketch comedy, especially, the question of creative risk is nowadays inseparable from the financial realities of getting work seen.
The climate of student sketch comedy at the moment is a tense one – with the cost of living meaning that month-long stints at Edinburgh are becoming harder and harder to fund. Just last year, the Revue had to fundraise £7000 to afford their Fringe run, a number that was achievable partly thanks to generous alumni donations. For groups without such a rich history, the financial shortfall is impossible to overcome.
This is precisely why it is so important to go and support these groups. Sketch comedy remains a unique space where student voices can be rough, ambitious, and occasionally wrong, but also unique and utterly original. Go and support it; you won’t regret it.
The Durham Revue are performing ComedyFest at the Gala Theatre on Saturday 7 February 2026, alongside The Oxford Revue and Leeds Tealights. Tickets are available here.
Featured Image: The Durham Revue