Edinburgh Fringe Festival veterans The Noise Next Door are masters of improv comedy, delivering in Poole an evening of what on the surface appears to be nothing but disorganised chaos.
Tonight, Matt Grant, Tom Livingstone, Sam Pacelli and Robin Hatcher were taking suggestions about the best, worst and weirdest things imaginable about the town.
These good, bad or indifferent suggestions are then spun into good, bad or indifferent comic scenes by the fantastic foursome – meaning that each show is unique and reliant on germinating these seeds of ideas into the bloom of performance.
The Noise Next Door have done the Edinburgh Fringe 13 times, featured on TV on several occasions, worked alongside the likes of Harry Hill, Al Murray and Michael McIntyre, and go down particularly well at corporate events - they know how to do this stuff.
Of course, there is always some hidden structure to all this. It wouldn’t be unknown for a Poole audience to be in a ‘sit back and entertain me’ mood, so a little back-up and prompting preparation is absolutely necessary.
However, today’s crowd was very much in the mood – it’s particularly difficult to remain aloof in the intimate, almost in the round, Sherling Studio with the performers within touching distance, even more so when individual ‘victims’ are targeted individually and invited to participate.
Thus, a chap called Zach Mackenzie went from struggling to explain his job as a technical sales representative to performing forward rolls on stage and becoming the ‘Mayor of Poole’, complete with chain of office.
And that is how Christchurch construction company Harbourside Builders ended up in a multimedia skit, based on the audience’s scribbled drawings, as the main developer of Poole’s ‘new waterpark’ with the irrepressible Robin Hatcher even venturing into the bus station for an interval vox pop to research the firm (he was scarred by the experience).
And that is how audience member Julia was volunteered by friends to take part in the game show Choose It Or Lose It and somehow ended up winning £12 in a routing notable for Hatcher’s manic impression of Noel Fielding and the six-footer Tom Livingstone being asked to portray Warwick Davies and Wee Man from Jackass in Quick Succession.
You get the picture – the quartet announce the theme, then rely entirely on what is forthcoming to proceed with the sketch – thus we had making a cake Estonia style on the Titanic in 1066, a rap battle between Harry Potter and Mr Darcy and a drunk in a bar reliving, among other things, a horrible holiday, which for Sam Pacelli wasn’t that far removed from the truth of an awful fortnight in Crete last April.
The evening ended with the well-used improv technique of Hatcher trying to guess a situation (making a cup of Assam tea for the Queen at the Taj Mahal) from obscure and increasingly inventive clues proffered by the other three – notable for the elastic Matt Grant as a camp old actor writing a letter and hilariously trying to make ‘to whom’ sound like ‘tomb’.
As with any improv, one doesn’t know what is deliberate and what is accidental, thus when one caption read ‘Sale Town Council Meeting’, it remained unclear whether they had simply forgotten to change it from the previous night’s gig in the Greater Manchester town or had left it in for comic effect. If the latter, it worked.
The crew’s fast responses and quick wit are a sight to behold, a professional quartet at the top of its game – if they can do it on a wet Wednesday night in February in Poole they can succeed anywhere.
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