Review: THE IMPROVISED PLAY, Arcola Theatre

It seems a long time since the Improv boom of the late 80s, spawned on the back of Whose Line Is It Anyway’s heady mix of John Sessions being clever, Josie Lawrence’s silly songs and Clive Anderson tapping down his cards on his desk while awarding everyone 100 points. Back then, it seemed every other pub in Upper Street had a room at the back with an audience, drinks in hand, shouting absurd suggestions to would-be Tony Slatterys and Sandi Toksvigs.

Well, The Improvised Play, once it gets started, isn’t really like that. Sure it’s ask the audience for a Time, a Place and a Situation, but then it’s over to Lola-Rose Maxwell and Charlie Kemp, with a few props scattered about, to construct a three act play, on the hoof, in an hour, with no more lifelines.

Of course, as in the quickfire sketches of the TV format, what we’re really buying, the source of the lift that makes the show fly, is the chemistry between the performers, the delight we take as one anticipates the other’s thought and goes with it (or, better still, subverts it). The fun is in seeing situations develop into absurdity and then, having locked each other up in narrative chains, watching an elegant, funny escape that amuses the performers as much as it does ourselves.

But, with no sketch lasting longer than a minute for two, if something isn’t quite working, it hardly matters as there’s another one round the corner. Not so if you’ve created characters in the first five minutes and you’re more or less stuck with them for the next 55.

The show I saw never really got over a start that created an odd couple (posh 24 year-old hippy chick bag designer and itinerant war veteran in his 50s from humble beginnings but with a public school accent, chancing to meet in Rome) and then couldn’t really find enough for them to do, carefully sidestepping the obvious opportunity to create an on-off romance given such age disparities. That would never have been a problem until recently and it got me wondering about how careful today’s improvisers have to be with the right to judge so much more embedded in audiences. Would a line like “You know I’ve always been a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio” get a laugh, a groan or a hiss?

The odd flight of fancy sparked, but narrative leads concerning Mafia links, a piratical Prime Minister father and a reluctance to use trains never really got going. Nor was there much of the detail that can bring an admiring smile as you marvel at how the performers got it into the show. A decent visual gag with the Colosseum’s columns soon fizzled out, indeed the specificity of the location was soon ditched for a more generic Italy.  

Each night will be different and I might have hit unlucky, but I suspect it had more to do with the venue - a theatre. The whole atmosphere and, perhaps more challenging still, a vault of memories, is rooted in carefully crafted drama, with all the expectations that brings. Where we sit, how we behave, even how the words sound, is not conducive to the loose, madcap vibe on which Improv thrives. 

We might all have had a lot more fun if we’d stayed in the bar outside, had a few more drinks and let The Improvised Play roll hither and thither. I suspect it would garner more ‘Thumbs Up’ in there. 

The Improvised Play is at the Arcola Theatre until 9 March

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