Sketch trio WitTank dig deep for their fully themed hour, The School
‘I'm starting to meet the teachers that they have been doing impressions of for years!’
Kieran Boyd, Mark Cooper-Jones and Naz Osmanoglu have been making steady progress over the last few years as the cheeky spoonerism sketch troupe WitTank. Having made several appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe, with a series of sketch shows that morphed from knockabout student revue to sleeker skits while still maintaining a delicious sense of the absurd, their latest show is a fully themed hour, The School.
Cooper-Jones and Osmanoglu met at school and went on to Durham Uni where they hooked up with Boyd when all three failed to get into Durham Revue. Undeterred, they formed their own group, performing three shows a year then taking their fruits to the Fringe. ‘We were pumping out one show a term, which meant whittling three hours down to one,’ recalls Boyd. ‘All we had to do was take the funniest sketches for Edinburgh.’
This time around they've dug deeper for inspiration – to Cooper-Jones and Osmanoglu's boarding school days. Having performed this show at Edinburgh last year, the trio returned to that educational establishment to run some comedy workshops. While there, Boyd discovered some of the real life inspirations for their show’s cast. ‘I'm starting to meet the teachers that they have been doing impressions of for years!’ he laughs. ‘I found that a very, very strange experience. “Oh right, you didn't write that guy, he just exists! He lives here!”’
Blackfriars Basement, Glasgow, Mon 17 Mar; The Stand, Edinburgh, Tue 18 Mar.