PLAY REVIEW: Police Cops: The Original ★★★★

There is something reassuring about Police Cops: The Original. As The Edinburgh Fringe is increasingly obsessed with innovation, here is a show whose principal ambition is to be very, very silly, and which achieves it with almost alarming precision.

Created and performed by Zachary Hunt, Tom Roe and Nathan Parkinson, the show is a delirious spoof of the macho cop movies and television dramas of the 1970s and 80s. Rookie Jimmy Johnson teams up with grizzled veteran Harrison to tackle crime, corruption and an assortment of spectacularly dubious villains. The plot matters considerably less than the execution.

Hunt, Roe and Parkinson are a beautifully drilled comic unit, switching between characters, accents, props and physical set-pieces with machine-gun timing. Cheap-looking props become cars, weapons and entire locations; choreographed fights collapse into inspired chaos; 80s pop anthems propel the action onwards. It is knowingly low-budget theatre that somehow achieves blockbuster velocity.

Ten years on, Police Cops remains gloriously, defiantly daft – and remarkably hard to resist.