Please stop what you’re doing, immediately, and go and see this show.
I’m not joking – it is imperative that you mime putting down your teacup, tie your imaginary shoelaces, have a think about what rhymes with ‘lackadaisical’ and run, don’t walk, to a world of musical improbability at the Hackney Empire.
Every night from the 21st – 26th October, Lee Simpson, Josie Lawrence, Ruth Bratt and Niall Ashdown are joined by puppeteers Aya Nakamura and Clarke Joseph-Edwards to spectacularly manifest the seemingly impossible: an entirely improvised, professionally produced, ninety-minute musical, complete with a live orchestra accompanying the actors’ frequent bursts into never-before-heard song. Luckily for us, this feat of theatre indeed turns out to be merely the highly improbable.
In a style familiar to those who have seen some form of improvised theatre before, particularly sketch shows, the production opens with the cast taking three suggestions from the audience. They first called for a ‘good place’ – an audience member shouted ‘Downing Street’, which our unruffled thespian rejected, on the basis that they had radically reinterpreted the definition of the word ‘good’. An herb garden became the winning suggestion here. Next, we were asked for a word that feels pleasant in the mouth to say out loud – ‘lackadaisical’ was successful, after some relaxed confirmation of its definition between the cast members (to not care, be apathetic, etc, if you were wondering). Finally, we were urged to provide a ‘beautiful sentence’, with some excellent nonsense being proffered in the form of ‘the murder was horrible, yet the wind whispered’.
Oh readers. I could tell you about the unparalleled joy of watching the live births of such musical delights as ‘Why Is My Dill So Ill’, ‘Dust Cake’, ‘Nobody Loves You’ and ‘Pick Your Herbs In Your Own Garden (Stay On Your Side Of The Fence)’. These all have the promise to be smash hits – that is, if they were ever to be seen on stage again. You will simply have to see what happens on your particular night, which is of course a great part of the fun.
Some of these theatrical births are more painless than others, although the ultimate roaring success of a section with a shaky start is genuinely thrilling to witness. After Nakamura and Joseph-Edwards, two hitherto less prominent cast members wordlessly played with items in a tea set for an anxiety-inducing length of time, a completely magical moment of realisation rippled throughout the theatre, as a teapot, saucer and three teacups became, improbably, wondrously, a thoroughly charming, abstracted puppet creature. Ashdown jumped in with a spiel about the plight of the last duckling in every brood to jump into the pond for the first time, and suddenly I found myself caring very much about the fate of, what had been moments ago, a collection of inanimate household objects.
There are the occasional highly funny fourth wall-breaks, in which our cast acknowledge the inevitable mistakes, inconsistencies, and ‘where the hell are we going with this’ moments that are part and parcel of improvising a coherent narrative to a live audience for an hour and a half. This has the effect of winning us ever more round to their side, with what could have been glaring inconsistencies transformed into humorous highlights of the performance. Nakamura leaves a scene taking place in a shed via multiple exits, which is immediately picked up on by the other cast members. They note the strangeness of new doors appearing in the garden infrastructure and ceremoniously dub her ‘the magical lady in the shed’, who becomes a significant character in the unfolding plot.
I particularly enjoyed the creative use of props accidentally left behind from previous scenes. A scrunched-up ball of brown paper from the preceding ‘Dust Cake’ number (formed by means of an old couple’s lackadaisical approach to housekeeping over 39 years, and which bizarrely turns out to have regenerative properties when eaten) becomes ‘the ancient pebble’, the meeting point for our two unfortunate murder victims. A dropped umbrella which previously functioned as a walking stick sparks a relationship-ending conversation between two characters who have let the weeds grow in their romantic life. Such is the feeling that there is truly nothing a song can’t be written about.
My companion and I clutched each other in the stalls throughout, mouths agape with delight, tears in our eyes from laughter. I truly could not recommend this show more highly – pure theatrical magic.