Lano and Woodley unsubtly hinted during The Island that they would appreciate a standing ovation from their audience—and the one they got was well deserved. The Island got off to a bit of slow start as Lano and Woodley prepared to leave for their holiday, but I left the show with my spirits high. Lano and Woodley are a talented comedy duo, and their latest show represents simple, physical, slapstick comedy at its best.

The plot was simple: Lano (Colin Lane) and Woodley (Frank Wood) are flying to Hawaii, cooing over their cutely packaged airline meals, when their plane begins to experience a problem in its right engine. It crashes mid-air, and Lano and Woodley are left stranded on a desert island, struggling for survival with no food, water, or shelter. The production’s main prop, a staircase operated off-stage, was a little more complex. I was fascinated to watch it go up and down on different angles, flatten, revolve at various speeds, and jolt—seemingly to the surprise of the performers. It figured not only as a staircase, but also as an airplane, a scaffold, and a palm tree.

As in their comedy series The Adventures of Lano and Woodley, which screened on the ABC in the late 1990s, Lano and Woodley are cast as two life-long friends: Lano is a little arrogant and overconfident, while Woodley—distinguished by his trademark short-brimmed maroon hat—is his bumbling, hapless, but blithe, cohort, by whom he is easily irritated. Indeed, The Island is a success not because of its storyline, but because Lano and Woodley are distinct, well-developed, lovable characters, with whom the audience obviously empathised.

The gags aren’t always funny, but Lano and Woodley’s lameness is part of what makes them so appealing. Often, the performers’ non-verbal work—their comic facial expressions and body language—is what provides hilarity. Lano and Woodley’s observational material may not be terribly deep or sophisticated, but it is clever nonetheless. Lano and Woodley’s strength lies in their ability to stage mishaps, to create their show by seemingly messing it up along the way. In one incident, Woodley throws a match into a washed-up suitcase to create a fire. However, the fire appears to get out of control, and the performers panic. Lano runs off stage and retrieves a fire extinguisher, which he uses to quench the flames. The performers convincingly insisted that the incident was not meant to happen; Woodley said that normally he throws the match into the suitcase and then does “a sort of river dance” around it. When Lano and Woodley asked the audience for their opinion of whether they thought the fire was planned, the show of hands was equivocal.

As in almost every comedy act, The Island contains references to sex, and the topic is made amusing because of Lano’s exasperation at Woodley’s naivety. Woodley must get off the island because he’s never had “a root”, and Lano sympathises because it’s important to have played “hide-the-salami”. But Woodley insists that he has in fact played “hide-the-salami”—once he hid a stick of salami in the back of his refrigerator so well that he forgot about it, and when he rediscovered it, it was grey and moldy. When Woodley declares that “you really shouldn’t hide smallgoods”, Lano throws up his hands and says: “it’s a metaphor for sex, you idiot!”

Much of the fun of the show lies in Lano’s seriousness about creating an “island reality”, a performance that authentically captures a struggle for survival, while Woodley is constantly, unintentionally, upsetting the plan.