It’s improv. It’s a game show. It’s delight­ful chaos. It’s The Saboteur. 

Off the back of sold-out sea­sons in the NZ Improv Fest­iv­al in 2019 and in Mel­bourne in 2020, The Saboteur is just over an hour’s worth of improv chaos as a part of this year’s Com­edy Fest.

Five impro­vis­ors, one of which is try­ing to sab­ot­age the show from with­in. Can you guess the saboteur? I cer­tainly could­n’t, though my theatre-going com­pan­ion could. Using a clev­erly-made web­site and our smart­phones, the audi­ence could vote on who they thought the saboteur was. In the end, only 26% of us got it right. I was­n’t one of them.

With a rotat­ing cast – and of course, it’s improv – you’re not going to get the same show every night. Across about an hour and a quarter, five impro­visers (last night’s show was Stevie Han­cox-Monk, Clare Ker­ris­on, Jen O’Sul­li­van, Lyn­don Hood and Wiremu Tuhi­wai) are led through a series of improv games by the host (Jim Fish­wick), as they com­pete to win our hearts.

From mimed moments about soup, per­form­ing scenes in only a spe­cif­ic num­ber of words, dra­mat­ic retell­ings of their first kisses, and much more – these per­formers are incred­ible at what they do and leave the audi­ence in hys­ter­ics, des­pite the 10pm start time.

Though the show feels a little too stuck in its format at times, and almost a smidge too expos­i­tion­al (?), it’s delight­fully fun and won­der­fully unpre­dict­able. I think some of the most enjoy­able moments come from the truly bizarre – three per­formers mak­ing a scene across three sep­ar­ate and unre­lated genres at once comes to mind here.

The Saboteur is the fab­ulous cherry on the top of a stacked Com­edy Fest pro­gramme. Check it out at BATS from now until Sat­urday the 22nd of May 2021.