Veronica Aloess talks to writer/director Adam Jarrell and actor Andrew Fettes about the play 'Good Cop Bad Cop' and discovers there being more to making people laugh than just being funny...

The West End has a fair amount of laughs to offer between The 39 Steps, The Play That Goes Wrong and Neville's Island, but shows on the fringe circuit don't find it easy competing with the variety of stand-up that London has to offer. Primley Road are a company that pride themselves on bridging the gap between traditional drama and stand-up. Director and writer Adam Jarrell and actor Andrew Fettes explain their approach below.

Good Cop Bad Cop "is first and foremost a play" Jarrell says but - revealing the key to this hybrid form - "it could be a stand-up routine if it was to be read out". Illustrating how this works, Fettes explains "there are these moments almost like set routines, but the routine carries the story along and there's revelations within that."

Jarrell thinks that they've managed to find a niche in the genre. "I mean, look at a lot of industries now, like how many jukebox musicals are there? Comedy over the past few years has become the new rock and roll. I personally think it's oversaturated." He surmises that the form they've come up with is "relentless really, like a stand-up routine, it's just joke after joke after joke - with a plot."

The director goes on to explain that Primley Road's style owes a lot to great British comic influences, "Gervais and Merchant and the way they get the awkwardness spot on." Talking about his own production, he adds: "The wordplay got compared to The Two Ronnies in one review - it was fantastic to even be mentioned in the same sentence as them. And Monty Python, because a lot of that is bonkers."

Fettes goes on to discuss "the great tradition in British comedy for loveable hapless heroes." Primley Road have taken note of the successful staples of British comedy and built their play around them. Fettes gives the example: "think of Chaplin and Norman Wisdom, the hopeless idiot Gervais in The Office... My character is quite clichéd, but audiences feel very at home with that. Then the layers reveal themselves."

Good Cop Bad Cop is a "crime cop comedy caper", and Jarrell further recognises the popularity of the genre, with films like Hot Fuzz, or Charlie Brooker's TV series A Touch of Cloth. "The cop thing has been overdone to a degree," he admits, but it has taught him what audiences like: "We play with clichés a lot - the title in itself is one. Clichés strike a chord with people because they think they know what's coming, but then we surprise them."

Fettes (pictured) is an experienced comic actor, "I'm a five foot six, middle-aged man, I'm never going to play Hamlet, you know? So I've always played a lot of character roles." Consequently, he's familiar the challenges that come with performing comedy. "Something as tightly written and rehearsed as this, you know how to say lines to get a laugh. But some nights they may take a different journey. You may just not feel funny one night. Take opera singers, they may have a bit of a cold, but somehow they'll go on and perform, and that's because they'll go back to their technique. Like that, a comedian will go back to theirs, the foundations built in rehearsal."

Fettes explains that having this foundation gives the actors freedom to play, "our ears are open and listening, so we can play to the audience and temper lines differently."

I can't help but think an ability to improvise like this is a difficult skill for actors to hone, but then again stand-up comedians have to do it all the time when tailoring shows for different audiences in different towns and coming up quick witted responses to hecklers...

Fettes himself admits his previous experiences performing stand-up probably developed his ability as a comic performer, "It's great preparation for the stage because you'll never feel that scared again. I don't think there's a job harder in entertainment than one person standing in front of one microphone standing in front of a room full of people going 'Make me laugh'. You have the same responsibility in a play, but you have other people and props to help you."

Discussing bad audience responses, he tells me a story about performing Ha Ha Hamlet! to the local book club in Radlett, "It was 60 people who just didn't want to laugh. They sat there with their arms crossed and their stony faces said 'this is no Hamlet'". In contrast, I discover that the opposite of a night like this might be a night when you find yourself corpsing onstage, "that's the joy of comedy, you're making one another laugh onstage when you might have an audience of hundreds. But that's when you have to let the audience in on the joke, so they understand that's not meant to happen and then they can laugh too."

Speaking to Jarrell and Fettes, I realise that there's more to making people laugh than just being funny; understanding comedy in the context of rehearsing a play reveals something of a formula. But, at the end of the day, Jarrell returns to the point, "I turn up to work at 10 O'Clock in the morning ready to laugh, and that's a joy. We don't want to save the world or anything, we just want to entertain."

'Good Cop Bad Cop' is at The Leicester Square Theatre until the 15th November. For tickets and more information please see: Facebook