Rural targets

The Great British Country Fête
Bush, until 14 August

The Great Game: Afghanistan, Part 1
Tricycle, until 29 August

Russell Kane, a rising star of stand-up, has penned a musical satire with an inflammatory theme. His play opens in a Suffolk village where the locals have risen up against Tesco’s attempts to blight the community with a thumping new shopping hub. Excellent subject! Rabid, thoughtless expansionism by supermarkets inspires rage in every corner of the country (apart from London, which couldn’t care less). After this superb set-up, the show goes wrong immediately and stumbles off in search of easy targets, facile rustic caricatures — the randy vicar, the gay farmer’s boy, the thick ferret-fancier, the racist lady from the WI, and so on. Here are some of Mr Kane’s gags. A farmer holds up a jar of home-made jam. ‘It’s got a hat. So it’s like a person.’ Later he imagines ‘getting a visa and going to Norfolk’. On this cold and heartless page these quips may look weaker than they sounded in real life but they give a measure of the show’s creative ambition. Mr Kane, who seems new to sketch writing, hasn’t mastered the art of joke geography and punchline placement. But it’s easy to learn. First write the sketch. Then write the sketch ten more times. Then find the best joke to emerge from that process. Then put it at the end of the sketch. That’s all there is to it.

The excellent cast, led by Katie Brayben, throw everything they’ve got at the show and the funniest moments come from the unscripted flourishes and gestures they’ve added. Towards the end, a high-quality routine appears. A gang of Bulgarian peasants sing an anthem celebrating the emptiness of Bulgarian folk culture.