An Online Review of  'Travels With My Aunt', by Lucy Close (Local Secrets - www.localsecrets.com), March 2007:

Travels with my Aunt started off as a book by Graham Greene, a black comedy lampooning the stuffy fastidiousness that we Brits take as such an admirable personality trait. This highly popular novel became an award-winning play, which has been excellently interpreted in this adaptation by the Combined Actors of Cambridge.

As the title suggests, the protagonist (super boring retired bank manager Henry Pulling) goes on a voyage of discovery with his aunty (brazen aging prostitute and all-round criminal Augusta). His life hitherto has been mostly concerned with weeding the dahlias and eating a boiled egg with his tea, but his wonderfully naughty aunty whisks him away across the world and into a seedy underworld of war criminals, sex addicts and smugglers. Henry's journey is like a bizarre raunchy Buddhist voyage of discovery, less about the places he goes than the journey of his soul. By going to the darkest nastiest places he finds out what morality is - can it exist if we have never questioned it? Oohmmm?

The production really brings out the best of this premise: an empty stage, the cast dressed in funeral suits. The audience is taken with Henry on a mutual voyage of the imagination, where the outlandish characters we meet take us to new exotic places in our minds. The cast of six bring to life all these weird and wonderful personas with plenty of comic panache, the stylisation bordering on mask-like at times, faces, bodies and movements seeming much larger than life.

This outrageously funny production had the audience laughing out loud from start to finish and is definitely worth seeing before it ends its run on Saturday. The play is classic British humour at its best and the Combined Actors of Cambridge are a troupe with some really strong performers.

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