It's inspired by French film La Ronde and was summed up by one critic as "comedy for smart people", but don't let that put you off.

The third show from unconventional double-act Laurence and Gus, Next in Line took the Edinburgh Fringe by storm this summer thanks to its unique twist on the traditional sketch show format.

"We wanted to do a show where each sketch was somehow linked," says Laurence Howarth, who has written for the likes of Alistair McGowan's Big Impression and That Mitchell and Webb Look and pens all the pair's material. "So we had this idea that one character from the first sketch would stay on for the next, and then the new character from the second sketch would stay on for the third, and so on.

"In the first scene, an actor gets shot for a very bizarre reason that only becomes apparent at the very end of the show, but I confuse myself if I start trying to explain how everything links up."

Sharing a wry sense of humour and numerous knocks from the toilet circuit, Howarth met Gus Brown, a TV actor and musician, at the Edinburgh Festival. The former was doing stand-up and the latter "improvising on an Iranian carpet".

"The first sketch we wrote was about David Dickinson, sex toys and pizza," says Howarth. "There was a slight argument as to who was going to be David Dickinson, so we both were - two David Dickinsons."

Together they focussed on the subtle art of the long-form sketch, and in 2003 won the Double Act Award for A History of the World in 5 1/2 Sketches, a fusion of nuanced narrative with brilliantly inverted situation comedy, which featured a father and son who talked freely of love and emotions but choked up whenever called upon to discuss football, and a Belgian astronomer who discovered the Earth was slightly squidgy.

They followed it in 2004 with Men in Love, a gloriously silly dissection of men's handling of said emotional minefield. This time around Howarth has conceived "a complete mesh of ambitious, frustrated and fearful people trying to find their way out of the anterooms of life", including an assassin seeking to retrain as a florist and Knorman Knopfler, son of Mark, who's horrified to discover he has no talent whatsoever on the guitar.

"We have a clothes rail on stage and don't leave the stage at any point during the night," explains Howarth. "Seeing the same character in different situations exposes some of the fronts that we all put up. They're all characters feeling like the opportunity they were waiting for has probably just passed around the previous corner."

  • Starts 8pm, £10/£8, 01273 647100