UK boys Tom Skelton, Doug Walter, Chris Turner and Dylan Townley (their fifth member Daniel Roberts was absent) put on a hell of a show, shaped entirely by audience suggestions and containing many a backwards spoken word, over the top accents (both British and otherwise), random facts and a hell of a lot of laughs.
As with all improv shows, talking about the plot is essentially useless, however on our particular night the title character was called Beverley The Great (played beautifully by Skelton), her dark secret was that she had a toupee, the story opened in a yarn factory in Chad (Africa) (and yes, that was literally what the audience suggestion said, Chad, brackets, Africa) and the show was brought to us by Australian Lamb. Also young Lauren from the audience was selected as the author of the play and she titled it "Balloons Popping In Trees".
All that led to Richard Branson (Walter), a yarn factory owner in Chad called Chad (Walter again), a very downtrodden Beverley from Scunthorpe with two children, impromptu ads for lamb by very Australian ad folk and the 51st annual around the world balloon race.
What was brilliant about Skelton, Walter, Turner and Townley is they were all very happy to let the story go where it wanted to, were more than happy to ambush each other, throw in random one-liners and go out of their collective way to make the show fantastically funny. And their accents, both real and invented, were definitely a bonus and made them all the more interesting to listen to (although I did have to resist the urge to parrot Walter's accent back to him when he went around handing out pens and cards before the show).
I was especially impressed by the speed at which they all were able to fire off brilliant stuff, and particularly when Townley does a little interval song based on a couple in the audience... I'm sure it's a variation on a theme each time, but it came together amazingly fast.
As far as improv shows go, Aaaand Now For Something Completely Improvised is definitely an A+++.
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