Nothing to Show: Fringe 2012
Live Review
TheSpace On The Mile @ The Radisson

The Watch This improv troupe work affably together, but seem to lack a cohesive group dynamic. Often groups that have worked together for a long time develop an instinct about their fellow players, that’s absent here. We know this is all off-the-cuff stuff but there's a difference between spontaneity and floundering, which this performance dipped into several times.

Audience suggestions for the warm-up game are gathered in the queue outside: W e are asked to write down a problem and an object that they use to solve it, there's nothing spectacular here but then it's just a daft game to kick things off.

For the rest of the show the group use the Harold format of long form improv where there is just one long story based on a single topic, though they are usually several subplots intertwined.

‘Rainbow’ was the decided topic tonight and as is the method in this form the show started life as four individual monologues: a Leprechaun living at the end of the rainbow; a new age woman and her auras; a Care Bear gone bad and a rhino apparently delivering a speech of some kind.

It's an ambitious structure, the obvious problem is that if it doesn't work, tough, you've got it to the end of the show. Here there's only one narrative thread that works as a nice conceit, the vigilante Care Bear hooks up with dizzy Barbie and off they ride on Barbie's bicycle to avenge the massacre of the other Care Bears at the hands, or rather hooves, of some sadistic My Little Ponies.

Elsewhere the Leprechaun is joined by a novelist researching a novel that leads up to the, apparently obligatory mention of Fifty Shades of Grey. The rhino has been ditched and instead has joined the new age woman who has opened a shop selling some kind of beads that may or may not be strange and magical.

Most of the players looked like they were having a laugh, some – it has to be said –  looked a little bored at times but there did seem to be a sense of achievement that they'd made it through to the end.

But bar one narrative tonight, this wasn't a spectator sport. In fact by the close of show there was a sense of  bewilderment from some that they'd paid to come in.