The involvement of big-time performers such as Kiell Smith-Bynoe – he of Ghosts fame – has been credited with reviving UK improv. On the flipside, hobbyist household names don’t always reveal the art form in its best light. Happily, Smith-Bynoe proves no mere dilettante in Kool Story Bro, which cooks up entertaining antics from personal stories volunteered by three audience members. I doubt even its host would claim this is improv at its most meticulous; he himself referred to the previous night’s offerings as “dogshit”. But it’s hard to imagine it ever not being good fun.
The format accommodates a guest quizmaster, and – what a treat – tonight it’s Smith-Bynoe’s Ghosts co-star Lolly Adefope. Her role is to solicit and interrogate each audience member’s kool story, and she so revels in doing so, the show’s talky part (supposed to be just a prompt) threatens to swallow up the whole hour. That tale is about a nude life-drawing class; a later one features a solo holidaymaker ambushed at sea in Colombia. Once (or, thanks to Adefope, long after) the team have enough to go on, they bring these scenarios to comic life.
The joke is in the discrepancy between a story told and a story enacted, as Smith-Bynoe and team (which tonight includes Lara Ricote and Lola-Rose Maxwell) extrapolate major comic features from minor details in the original narrative, and fill interpretative gaps with eccentric character and performance. And so a shifty T-shirt seller in one story becomes in Smith-Bynoe’s hands an egotistical beat-boxer. And a side note about Colombian kidnappers speaking in unison triggers a sequence in which they perform a theatre show on the Edinburgh fringe.
The scenes are short, sharp, and follow a rough-cut path towards funny. Minimal effort is made at narrative cohesion, far less a beginning, middle and end. One volunteer’s story is largely ignored in favour of an improv based around Adefope’s gossip about James Corden – which finds Smith-Bynoe cast as the Gavin & Stacey man in a Hollywood movie. The team get plenty of juice out of that joke, and others too, in a show that – because or in spite of its celebrity casting – will keep improv’s popularity bobbing along nicely.
• At Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 22 August. Then touring from 4 October.
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