Review: Jay and Silent Bob, Edinburgh Festival Theatre

Their meandering improvisational chatter around topics as wildly diverse as kilts, Braveheart and the Loch Ness Monster (presumably their London date featured detailed discussions on bowler hats, Alfie and Jack the Ripper) was abruptly replaced by Mewes’s tales of childhood woe at the hands of a drug-dependent mother and his own inevitable slide into addiction. But just as a TV news item on famine might be followed by footage of a talking badger, this misery memoir swiftly made way for a “game”, in which up-for-it audience members enacted “imaginative” sexual scenarios.

As a contrasting double act, Smith does mildly cerebral to Mewes’ vividly scatological. While the former provides the odd pithy retort and recollection of a celebrity encounter gone horribly awry, the latter merely brings every anecdote around to enthuse about genitalia. In the main, this was lapped up raucously by a houseful of ardent fans (has the Festival Theatre played host to so many checked shirts and beards before?), but one noisy walk-out was met by disgruntlement from the stage: “Hey man, I wonder what they expected?” Who knows, maybe less predictable self-indulgence and more in the way of a joke or two?

Rating: **