Greyfriars Twisted Tales

So how come three guys, two guitars, a keyboard and a couple of plants, (the sort from the audience who can sing, not the sort with leaves), performing in a Portakabin with no scenery except for a short-legged table, manage to garner a five-star review? Stay awhile and all will be revealed.

First things first. They, brothers John and Gerry Kielty together with Houston, the one who isn't a brother, are known as The Martians. They look as though they might be a country and western group, or maybe a folk group, or even a heavy metal group who have lost most of their gear. What they don't look like are a group who perform sophisticated, deadpan, comic songs.

They do look as though they might be interested in the darker, more macabre sides of life, so their choice of events surrounding the history of Greyfriars Kirkyard seems just right.

So far, so OK. Their wicked send-ups of Papal intolerance (Reformation) and Edinburgh's corpse disposal scheme (Not A Valley Anymore), are expertly played and delivered.

With the arrival of the sheep and a Greyfriars Bobby to put Disney to shame the whole show shifts firmly into four star territory. The song Heaven, about the qualities of various Dr Whos, starship captains and other lesser celebrities, keeps it there. So does the most vivid account of Burke and Hare yet heard in a Portakabin.

So far, then, so vivid, funny and highly entertaining. Then something extraordinary happens. A suggestion is made that to make money out of musicals you have to do something very close to a mega-hit but not close enough to be sued. Cue a World War Two extravaganza to leave Mel Brooks green with envy. Admittedly Mary Poppins vs the Nazis, or 'MP2' to give it its official anonymity, doesn't have much to do with Greyfriars, but as MP helps Hitler to his end with A Little Bit Of Sugar Helps The Cyanide Go Down you won't be worrying about a technicality like that.

The whole thing, with wonderfully adapted lyrics, is musical parody taken to dizzying heights of bad taste, leaving its audience helpless with shocked, amazed delight and the sort of laughter that's almost too painful to cope with.

The precision of performance is faultless, and that certainly includes the two plants, Marianne Sellar and Derek Elsby. After that it's almost a relief to end the show with a merely charming and funny anthem to Nessie, complete with singalong chorus.

So altogether this is a witty 50 minutes of excellently delivered deadpan comedy that contains within it a delirious passage where time seems to stop, the world seems transformed and which no one who sees it will ever forget ' five stars in anybody's language.