An engaging hour of well crafted, chaotic improv comedy
Chekhov’s Fun and Facts May Vary are two improv groups performing at the Edinburgh International Improv Festival. We are treated to two thirty-minute sets, where the audience gives some prompts and then gets to sit back and enjoy the madness of the genre.
Edinburgh’s Chekhov’s Fun showcased a real tightness in their comedy. A few suggestions from the audience, based upon the careers of family members, threw up a range of interconnected sketches featuring: a deadly van carrying inexplicably hot Dandelion and Burdock; a disenfranchised costume designer working towards a children’s pantomime without an audience; and family law judge dealing with some rather alternative views on child labour.
With improvised comedy, it has to be assumed that not everything will work out, but this group showed a togetherness that allowed more sketches to hit than to miss. The groups willingness to join in, help each other and crucially stop sketches from going on too long showed a band of artists who are about as well rehearsed as an improv group can be.
Liverpool’s Facts May Vary offered a different style of improv, introducing the idea of a documentary based around a convention. When looking for prompts from the audience, they settled on a cutlery convention. The idea threw up some fun moments, including a legendary holding-a-spoon-on-the-nose record holder, a father and son knife sales team and a battle between Sean Bean and a Gordon Ramsay who abandoned his adopted Southern English accent for a Northern lilt. While on the face of it, it seems like a topic that has a lot of opportunity for absurd comedy, it turned out to be a topic that had fairly shallow depths to reach.
Still, this is a skilled group of improvisers, who made do with what they were given. By the end of the thirty minute set, we were entertained by a chaotic convention of memorable characters that could be built into a sketch show based around cutlery. The only real let down within Facts May Vary was the lack of using the conventions of the documentary to their benefit. The documentary idea felt very much like an afterthought rather than something that was well worked into the set. Nevertheless, the group put on a very funny show.
The show on the whole was a success, and the two troops performing together allowed the audience to get a full introduction to some top improv comedians from around the world. Maybe they also learned something along the way.
I, for one, will never fight Sean Bean or say yes to driving a milk truck delivering Dandelion and Burdock.
The International Improv festival runs until the 8th March at Monkey Barrel Comedy.