9 – 10 March
It’s a winning formula. Get the audience to throw coloured ping pong balls into a pair of stretched bloomers. Read the words inscribed upon the first few plucked out. Write them on a blackboard. Perform an improvised Shakespearean play based on the words.
This is theatre in the raw, nothing pre-planned, without sets or costumes save said bloomers and a skirt. As tonight’s cast of four, drawn from Impromtu Shakespeare’s wider team of 13 freely offer: “We have no idea what’s going to happen tonight!”
And we’re off. The ping pong balls fly. The words ‘mistaken identity’; ‘suitors’; ‘window’ and ‘cuckold’ are duly written up on the board then worked into an unscripted piece. Daniel (Danny) and Karen, names taken from audience members, become the fulcrum of tonight’s improv mash-up – Romeo the Twelfth meets And Juliet Night perhaps. Danny hails from Newcastle and much mirth is derived from Tom Tokley’s attempts to nail the accent, veering as it does towards Yorkshire via Surrey during the evening.
Danny morphs into a much-swooned over minstrel that women find hard to resist. The oppressed Karen, bound by a silken (invisible) thread to her ankle by her controlling father seeks to marry the man who has ‘affected her loins’ with his melodious offerings about a rabbit – cue much giggling from the bench seats. And on we go, short scene by scene punctuated by a dimming of the lights. The identity of Danny seems to splinter like a dividing atom as other would-be suitors seek the hand of the lovely Karen by their pretence to be the source of the young woman’s ardour. Karen’s dad becomes ever more confused and bewildered, lashing out and ‘killing’ the real Danny in his attempts to stop an unsuitable marriage for his daughter, only for Karen to ‘plunge the knife’ into herself later in remorse. A Shakespearean stage slopping with (imagined) blood, what better antidote to the shadow of Putin casting its gloom over our lives!
When I last reviewed them in 2017, I described the troupe as ‘unleashing a thesp’s goodie bag of Shakespearean methodology to their performances… creating realistic facsimiles with the seeming nonchalance of a builder’s whistle’. This remains the case.
That they have survived the Covid nightmare and are back touring again is akin to witnessing spring flowers puncture the bleakness of a drawn-out winter. This is living theatre alive to social and political nuance, where each night will flourish with its unscripted direction in a world of silliness underplayed with all of life’s gravitas. Tonight’s performance courted the juvenile at times, but still managed to tickle the audience’s funny bone.
“Come back and see us again tomorrow, we have no idea what’s going to happen then!” say the cast at the end. Words that somehow seem to chime perfectly with the times we are living through.
★★★★☆ Simon Bishop 10th March
