Most writers and comics spend months – even years – honing scripts and refining gags. Chicago improvisers TJ Jagodowski and David Pasquesi make mincemeat of all that, plucking from thin air a one-act, multi-character play that is as funny, shrewdly observed and emotionally complex as many a slaved-over work. Right up there with the best of the Pajama Men and Improbable Theatre, they really are Zen masters of their art. I found their unshowy and beadily intelligent improv blissful to watch.
There are no frills, gimmicks or audience participation, just two middle-aged men building a story detail by extemporised detail. It begins with two office workers wondering at the late arrival of a third. One of them wears a new watch, bequeathed by his dead dad; the other, touched, spontaneously phones his own father. On these bare bones, fragments of a tale are fleshed out, in which an elderly couple fret about macaroni etiquette, a 7-Eleven attendant kvetches about his uncle Marcel, and a driver with blood spattered across the grill of his car “has no idea if it was a kid or a raccoon”.
It’s all played in a strikingly low key, as Jagodowski and Pasquesi let their off-the-cuff but pointed dialogue play out at an everyday pace, following where it leads. Tonight, it doesn’t lead to closure: the show ends abruptly after 45 minutes, its story unsatisfactorily concluded. In every other regard, however – as actors, comics, improv virtuosos – TJ & Dave give full enjoyment.
- At Soho theatre, London, until 15 April. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
