Perhaps I caught them on a bad night – regardless, this show needs work.
My mum nurses a soft spot for improv. I once had the privilege of witnessing her cry with laughter at a late night Fringe scratch show, where the disparate threads of increasingly absurd audience suggestions were spun into comedy gold before our eyes. Recently, I reviewed the inimitable An Improbable Musical at Hackney Empire. Ever my favourite proofreader, she told me it made her desperately want to see the show, but sadly the run was soon coming to a close. Imagine my delight when the opportunity to review an improvised one-act play by improv duo Hamza Mohsin and Jake Migicovsky, together forming Avocado Presents, presented itself – I gleefully asked her if she’d like to be my guest on her birthday.
We were handed a couple of flyers upon descending the stairs separating theatre and watering hole, The Curtain’s Up pub. Curiously, none of the glowing review quotations had been accredited to anyone, or even put in quotation marks. I recognised this trick immediately – I attempted it myself when first producing a show at university before being admonished by the director. Cripes.
A ‘one act play’ is a generous description of the series of divergent skits that followed. Rather than taking audience suggestions, which tends to lend a feeling of veritable spontaneity to improv, the duo just kind of vibed, which lent a feeling of an unrehearsed sketch show. Connecting themes, if any, seemed to be exploring traits of toxic masculinity, getting wasted and working out what to do with the broken chair from the set of the preceding show.
The main downfall seemed to be a flagrant ignoring of the first rule of improvisation, lesson one of any am-dram improv workshop: namely, the ‘yes, and’ rule. If someone throws an idea out into a scene – ‘Bill, your hair’s on fire!’, for example – all other parties should ideally rush for an imaginary bucket with which to douse the unfortunate Bill, rather than say, ‘no it’s not’. There are many exceptions to this rule, of course, which frequently do make for some of the funniest comedic moments, but it is the first rule for a reason. Hamza and Jake’s interactions were characterised by an overwhelming sense of negation, as opposed to the affirming ‘yes, and’ rule. While potentially riffing on themes of male conflict and friendship negotiated amid societal pressure to assert dominance and exert power, it mostly meant the scenes just didn’t go anywhere, and were frequently stopped in their tracks. This was epitomised by Hamza putting away the aforementioned broken chair, before Jake brought it back and insisted on fixing it. It decidedly could not be fixed, as he discovered in front of his bewildered audience.
A road trip interrupted by two policemen indeed provided an apt metaphor for the show. Ironically, this was the best of their scenes, containing fun moments which acknowledged the elements of surprise and play central to their work. As Jake whipped around to the other side of the vehicle to become a second officer, Hamza and his character’s reactions aligned with a mildly startled, ‘Oh, there’s another one’. Jake jumped back into his initial role, quickly establishing he had been too baked to participate much in the proceedings. ‘Is there a law, officer, against driving with a foot?’ he manages to ask (he had been driving with his foot), to the biggest laugh of the night.
However, they tended to fall back on these scenarios in which the comedy rested on their being drunk or high, exemplified by Jake pushing for there to be ‘something else’ in the suitcase on their road trip, with Hamza insisting there was just clothes, shoes and underwear in it. Again, this negation resulted in Jake’s pushing going nowhere, prompting him to reach behind his seat and magically find a leftover joint for them to smoke. Rejecting the literally infinite possibilities for the contents of that suitcase, and indeed for any number of weird and wonderful things that Jake might have stumbled across in his car, this simply comes across as lazy storytelling. I feel like I’m being quite harsh here. However, there are only so many opportunities for the flourishing of the lush, diverse multitudes of underrepresented, emerging talents in the comedy sphere, and these guys occupy one of those rare spaces. It’s time to shape up or move on.
Maybe the problem was I cared too much – they were pretty endearing, working hard to practise their craft, and clearly had talent – so it was frustrating when they simply never took off the ground. Perhaps a final few sketches would have provided this opportunity, but the night came to an abrupt end when, I sh*t you not, an improbably hammered audience member two seats down threw up over the row in front. Somewhat worryingly my mum laughed much, much harder at this than she had the entire evening. Next time, I’m taking her to see The Nutcracker.