Sold out yesterday. Hooray! 147 seats filled.
I did finally get in touch with Robin Hardy, and he did want to come and see the show either yesterday or today. No sign of him yesterday so perhaps he'll turn up this evening. We're all quite excited, Barunka in particular, as the real Wicker Man obsessive amongst us.
Got us all VIP tickets to the Perrier party last night (Demetri Martin won the main award and Gary Le Strange Best Newcomer - much as predicted) which saw us drinking till six in the morning. I suspect there will have been quite a number of poor shows early this afternoon, performed by comedians nursing free-drink-induced hangovers.
And an amazing review in The Spectator:
My pick of the festival is The Wicker Woman. I'd yawned and fidgeted my way through dozens of wonky psychodramas and misfiring satires, and when I finally found this witty and endlessly inventive comedy I felt I was drawing the very breath of life. The show parodies Seventies cult classic, The Wicker Man, a film which itself re-tells the oldest fable in any tongue: the propitiation of the gods by human sacrifice. But there's nothing ponderous or self-referential here. It's effervescent ingenuity is enhanced by the charm of the players: Lucy Montgomery, Barunka O'Shaughnessy and James Bachman. These three writer-performers have as much charisma and assurance as any comedians you will ever see. Still in their twenties they have mastered the full repertoire of comic theatre: dialogue, narrative, mask, song, puppeteering, dance paroddies, dream sequences, the lot. In its atmosphere and execution the show reminded me of Vic and Bob but there is more here than their thrusts of forced wackiness; you get a satisfying plot elaborated by a unifying intelligence. The jokes are simple, daft, self-knowing and self-mocking. In one sequence a character is calling for her lost lover in a gorge. Her cries come back to her in the form of an Echo (i.e. an actor off-stage repeating her lines). As she becomes more distressed her shouts grow indistinct and the Echo asks, 'Could you say that again?' It's the kind of throwaway idea that would have pleased Tommy Cooper. The gags come thick and fast and the strike-rate is impressive. No, perfect. Nothing fails.
As I sat there amid gales of laughter a phrase started repeating itself to me. West End hit. West End hit. And why not? This would satisfy everyone: the stand-up crowd, serious theatre fans, even families of kids, grannies and in-laws, because although this feels perfectly contemporary it lacks the coarseness that sours much live comedy. A treasure.
— Lloyd Evans
...so over the top that it almost sounds ridiculous, but it's worked its magic - a bunch of Spectator readers were in yesterday enjoying themselves thoroughly.
Only two more shows to go and then it's back to London again for another year.