While he has been touring and playing Edinburgh for many years with Paul Merton’s Impro Chums, Merton has now given his wife, Suki Webster, equal billing, but the show, and some of the chums, is pretty much the same, although they have used the American term ‘improv’ in their new title.
The titular duo open the show with a warm-up—not always needed for an Edinburgh audience that usually has a high proportion of performers—followed by a scene for which the audience provides sound effects collectively. Then the rest of the company is introduced: Kirsty Newton—who also plays keyboards—Sally Hodgkiss and their long-time collaborator, the great Mike McShane, who steals most of the scenes he is in.
The full company was involved in an instant story game from suggestions from the audience, which at the reviewed performance became “Donald Trump and the Toilet Brush”, followed by a “Who Am I” game in which Merton had to guess his profession from clues given by the others, again pieced together from suggestions from the audience. As he was the person who changes the time at Stonehenge with cocktail sticks wearing galoshes and nothing else, it took quite a long time.
There was a scene for which the actors had to switch to an emotion suggested by the audience each time they were stopped, one in which the actors could only move when physically manipulated by a member of the audience (which produced some quite suggestive poses) and an improvised new Shakespeare play (which McShane even managed to end with a rhyming couplet).
Finally, Merton and Webster took the lines of dialogue collected from some audience members before the start and tried to incorporate as many of them into a scene as possible without looking at them beforehand.
If you’ve seen these performers or any other impro comedy shows before, there’s nothing new here as some of the games—and some of the performers—have been around since Whose Line Is It Anyway? was on Channel 4 in the ‘90s, but these are some of the most experienced improvisers around, so the shows are always impressive and fun, even though even the performers don’t know what they will be about before the start.