f you’d placed a bet on which comedians would one day open their new farce in the West End – a fond tribute to end-of-the-pier comedy – you wouldn’t have plumped for The Pin. Or at least not until recently. Graduates of elite comedy finishing school Cambridge Footlights, Alex Owen and Ben Ashenden were always brilliant, but never anyone’s idea of heirs to Cannon and Ball. But that’s how they’ve cast themselves in The Comeback, a sort of two/four-hander about a pair of duelling double acts that, Covid permitting, re-illuminates theatreland next month. The show is being billed as “the cure for theatre” by producer Sonia Friedman, who describes its mix of big laughs, door slams and slapstick as a tonic for theatregoers after months bereft of live entertainment. Those who saw its original outing will agree: this dazzling neo-Noises Off was a highlight of the 2018 Edinburgh fringe. Owen and Ashenden have since spent two years developing that funny 50 minutes into a substantial stage play. They’ve also experienced out-of-the-blue success as the UK’s foremost purveyors of Zoom comedy. Their series of lockdown sketches, making hay with work-from-home video-conferencing etiquette, are hilarious (while also making it disconcerting to interview them, as I’m doing, over Zoom). “We did it to stay sane,” says Ashenden. “We were twiddling our thumbs like everybody else.” From Why You Should Always Click ‘End Meeting’, via Share Screen Nightmare, to an icky redundancy dialogue intruded on by amateur theatricals, these bite-size videos redeemed with laughter the dull material of our quarantined working lives. “We’d always wanted to film our sketches,” Ashenden goes on. “Given that lockdown put a low ceiling on production values, we thought: let’s just be carefree and make as much stuff as possible.” Soon, retweets were rocketing, and celebrity fans petitioning to guest-star. Dom Joly, Jack Whitehall and Alex’s mum, the actor Patricia Hodge, all did so. (The trailer for The Comeback, shot in Zoom-sketch style, features James Corden and Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott.) There’ll be celebrity guests in the live show, too – Stephen Fry and Catherine Tate are mentioned. But the big draw is the quality of the duo’s comedy, honed over a decade’s fringe and touring performances. Originally a three-piece, they soon devolved into a double-act specialising in “sketch shows posing as seminars on sketches”: high-concept, brain-melting meta-comedy distinguished by playfulness, if not always warmth. Only latterly – with their Radio 4 show and recent podcast sitcom The Special Relationship (a mockumentary about their effort to break America – did the pair edge into a more traditional stern-man, silly-man dynamic. Their early shtick “was partly about being recent undergrads,” they say, particularly when your alma mater teems with comedy-literate fellow performers. “In those formative years, the funniest thing is to pull apart the thing you’re doing – because that’s what makes your friends laugh. It’s only in your late 20s you realise there’s a bigger audience out there, and so much craft still to learn.” The Pin’s ambition, adds Ashenden, has always been “to make someone who would have been with us at [hip comedy producers] the Invisible Dot in a crowd of four laugh, and to make my grandma laugh, too”. Now they’ve the chance to do so. The Comeback tells the story of “Alex and Ben” and “Jimmy and Sid”, two double acts (one young, one old-school) sharing the bill in a clapped-out theatre when it’s revealed there’s a big-shot producer in the crowd. As the action switches from backstage to onstage and back again, the pleasure is in seeing The Pin flit dizzyingly between duos, in both their public and private personae. Edinburgh allowed the pair to road-test the gags. The job since has been “making sure that the older characters, and the Alex and Ben characters,” says Owen himself, “are bringing the psychological depth and the richness of their stories.” “It’s now much more of a play,” says Ashenden, “about what happens if you tie everything in your life to one other person.” They have not, they insist, been drawing on (or triggering) any discord in their own relationship. “Our characters have had terrible gigs and dashed hopes,” says Ashenden, “which I can’t say we’ve had to the same extent.” But it has cultivated in them a deep sympathy for and solidarity with their fellow double acts. Ashenden contacted Tommy Cannon, he says, on the recent death of Bobby Ball; Cannon will now be a guest-of-honour at the show. “And we hope other double acts might perform it in future,” says Ashenden. “Our dream would be for French and Saunders to do it.” The show is directed by Emily Burns, a National Theatre associate director, and also Owen’s wife. “There have,” he admits, “been wry shakes of the head at us upstarts from comedy being described as ‘the cure for theatre’.” But The Pin are confident their show can rise triumphantly above both Covid and distanced audiences. “There are so many jokes in it,” says Ashenden, “about ‘this performance is not going well’ and ‘something feels weird’. So it’s easy to fold Covid into the feeling of the show.” Understandably, they can’t wait to get started. “I was doing some filming with Martin Freeman last week,” says Ashenden. “When we read through the lines on set, the crew laughed. I was like, ‘What is that noise?’ I hadn’t heard people laugh since February.” • The Comeback is scheduled to open on 8 December at the Noël Coward theatre, London.