Comedy Store Players 25th anniversary show
Live Review

For no one else makes it look as easy as they do. A quarter-century of honed ad-lib skills and professional camaraderie make them unassailable. With much improvised comedy, especially the student collectives that spring up every Edinburgh Fringe, the laughs come from seeing them struggle for words and jokes.

But not with the Players. There are a few minor stumbles, but it can be as slick as any scripted show. In fact, it often takes one of them to deliberately put a spanner in the works – and Paul Merton is always the prime candidate for this – to remind the audience that it is unscripted after all. People do tend to be surprisingly sceptical about the authenticity of improv, especially when it’s as apparently effortless as this.

The games never change – and many will be familiar from Whose Line Is It Anyway? – but their direction does. Sure, the same suggestions come up – there are only so many film and theatre styles; and the team must be so bored of people yelling ‘dildo’ as a household object that it’s graciously batted away – but making it seamlessly funny is a tall order.

Yet many of the scenes here – especially in the quickfire game in which contestants can yell ‘freeze’ then replace one of the actors on stage, assuming the same physical stance – are snappy one-liners any writer would be rightly proud of. But after tonight, a night just like any other for the Players despite the occasion, they will evaporate into the ether; as will the extended musical playlet about a Chaucerian badger-farmer’s wife (the loosest item of the night); the hyrda-headed explanation of monkfish lacrosse, and the incomprehensible Spanish expert on chorizo and marriage.

It helps that they can read each other so well after all these years of course, taking over well-defined roles in the group. Neil Mullarkey is the de facto leader, the upper-middle class bloke whose control freaky becomes a running joke; Merton’s the disruptive child (at one point pulling down the Comedy Store sign); Andy Smart, looking like a bedraggled Top Gear presenter, brings bold, larger-than-life performance to contrast with more restrained, but deceptively sharp-witted, everyman of Lee Simpson. Richard Vranch is more precise, contributing pithy one-liners as well as musical accompaniment when needed – which is where the unfeasibly talented Josie Lawrence comes in to her own, generating quick-witted lyrics in any style, belying her usual delightfully bewildered persona.

This show will run and run…

I saw Paul Merton and his Impro Chums 12th June in Brighton and they were awesome. The jokes were really off the cuff and really funny! A must to all comedy fans, You simply cannot beat Improv Comedy!!! Paul is simply a fantastic comedian and it shows in his shows, I am still laughing at the sketches the team did....... ;)

Tracey Baker, June 2010

He seems to be the Lone Ranger of comedy; he turns up, does his thing, then disappears (for a week at least). To continue the cowboy motif he is the fastest gunslinger (improviser) and.... well that's all I've got on that. But he is consistently funny, his sketch show was marvellous and long may he continue to make us laugh.

Billy, June 2010

How can Paul Merton only have one comment on this site? I've only ever seen him on TV but he is amazing.

JLA, August 2009

The word genius is so often banded about these days but there is no disputing that Paul Merton is worthy of that title. If you've only seen him on Have I Got News For You or Room 101 then you've only seen a fraction of his talent. When he performs with the Comedy Store Players on Sunday nights at The Comedy Store, he is on fire.

Gareth Lewis, January 2007