Poprox Improv is the brainchild of a bunch of Wel­ling­ton theatre stal­warts: Pippa Drake­ford-Croad, Dylan Hut­ton, Aus­tin Har­ris­on, Nina Hogg, Jonny Paul & Nino Raphael, and it is a show abso­lutely worthy of their tal­ent. Per­formed for the first time this night at Miramar’s gor­geous new per­form­ance ven­ue – Roxy Live (a glor­i­ous new space in the foy­er of the Roxy Cinema on Park Road), this show is immers­ive, delight­ful and truly the most unhinged improv I’ve seen in a good long while.

(I mean that in a very com­pli­ment­ary way.)

A cab­aret of the whim­sic­al, the show is broken into sev­er­al games, which I’m pre­sum­ing will change across dif­fer­ent iter­a­tions of the show. Warm­ing us up with a rhyme game (with Nino set­ting the scene on the key­board), we’re encour­aged to boo when someone messes up, but there’s noth­ing at all mali­cious in it. Then Jonny plays four scenes with each of the oth­er per­formers duck­ing in to play the oth­er char­ac­ter in the scene, there’s a love story about two film pro­jec­tion­ists, a vigil for a cat and a frankly hor­ri­fy­ing scene at the dent­ist.  The show cul­min­ates in a power bal­lad remin­is­cing on what had just happened.

There is a cer­tain kind of joy in see­ing per­formers who like each oth­er per­form on stage togeth­er, and that is cer­tainly obvi­ous in this piece. There’s a degree of stitch­ing-up, a cer­tain kind of tease, a non­sense and a delight in the uncanny that makes the hour and change of this show pass very quickly.

This group delights in mis­fir­ings, with bizarre ask-fors taken, some ques­tion­able object work and mis­heard audi­ence prompts, but that’s the joy of it all.  Find­ing the awk­ward and abso­lutely power­ing through it is so enjoy­able to watch, and genu­inely quite a skill, and through­out the show I’m fre­quently laugh­ing so hard my chest hurts.

The chem­istry and the impro­vising tal­ent of this group can­not be under­stated. Though there are some chal­len­ging aspects to per­form­ing in a place like this – size, shape and breadth of the audi­ence are all unusu­al – they take to it incred­ibly well and provide us with a hil­ari­ous, fant­ast­ic work.

Abso­lutely bloody good, check out the next one next time they’re about, it’ll make your night.

 

For more details about Poprox Improv, hit them up on Face­book.