“Try not to mention too many animals. We’ve been getting a lot recently.” Impro is happening, and Paul Merton is soliciting suggestions from the crowd. The format cleaves to the Whose Line Is It Anyway? template: the audience contributes a film style (“horror!”), profession (“undertaker!”), or character from fact, fiction or history (“Nick Clegg!”); Merton and his chums then spin them (or fail to, which can be equally funny) into sketches about Albanian pothole engineers, randy caravanners or Ofsted androids.
If taking to the stage without a script can be described as a comfort zone, these performers are in one: they’ve been playing these games for a quarter-century or more. But what the show lacks in jeopardy, it gains in camaraderie and freedom from ego. There’s none of the neediness or smugness that sometimes bedevils impro. But there is generous teamwork between improvisers with complementary skills, and unfeigned amusement at one another’s struggles, tied tongues and bolts of inspiration.
I laughed a lot, at those uncomplicatedly glorious moments when a choice rhyme arrives from who knows where, or just at the fabulous arbitrariness of it all: the marrow carved into a statue of Lady Antonia Fraser; the bicycling koalas called Freeman, Hardy and Willis. This stuff couldn’t be written, and it’s invigorating to hear a different voice on stage: not of crafted artistry but of the performers’ subconscious, not set free exactly, but let exuberantly loose on a long leash.
At one point, that great improviser Lee Simpson was challenged somehow to express skiing, taxidermy and Welshness in a solo dance. The collectively held breath was palpable as audience and co-stars waited on his response; likewise the collective goodwill that carried him, and his daft dance, like a surfer’s wave to the shore. At such moments – and tonight there are several – impro supplies a uniquely precipitous brand of fun.
• At G-Live, Guildford, 22 May. Box office: 0844 770 1797. Royal & Derngate, Northampton, 23 May. Box office: 01604 624811. Then touring.
