Beansville presents: Video Store, The Courtyard Theatre
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Improv always makes a welcome apperance at Camden Fringe, and year will be no different, with a number of shows eager for your audience ideas to kick things off.
Included in those numbers is Beansville, who will be bringing their Video Store show to The Courtyard Theatre for four nights (4 – 7 August). For youngr readers, videos were the original streaming movies, with on-demand meaning a drive to the local video store to pick one out!
Beansville’s Colin Thomas and Katie Northcott agreed to stop rewidning the tapes for a while and sit down to chat with us about what is in store for us in August.
What can audiences expect from the show?
Colin: Beansville are a narrative longform improv group based out of Bristol, performing together since 2021. In Video Store, we improvise an entire show based on audience suggestions, with a focus on character, story and comedy. So, what we know is that audiences will be invited to our video store to choose a movie genre, give us a made-up title of the movie, and watch what unfolds. What we don’t know is… everything else.
Katie: All of us grew up in the era of video stores and VHS rentals, and so we are super familiar with the frustration of renting a movie and realising it hasn’t been rewound. So get ready to see this experience play out during our show!
Is Camden Fringe going to be the show’s first time on stage, or have you already performed elsewhere?
Colin: When you do improv, every night is the show’s first – and only – time on stage! But we’ve been performing around Bristol and further afield for several years, and the Video Store has featured such gems as Snakes on a Carriage, Ghost Centipedes from Hell, That’s Not My Garden, and Mr. Darcy Does Christmas.
What brought you all together?
Colin: The five of us – Ed, Mills, Tim, Katie, and me – met in the Bristol improv community, doing courses and seeing shows together.
Katie: When lockdowns hit we continued improvising online, then socially distanced, and had so much fun as a group that we kept performing regularly.
How important is audience interaction to you?
Katie: Improv relies completely on the relationships between the performers onstage, and the performers and the audience. So an audience that is positive and ready to engage with the world we are building together is a dream for us!
Colin: We love an audience that throws suggestions at us (when we ask for them!), and because everything is improvised, we can respond to what the audience is enjoying and do more of that. We want to make the audience laugh, but we also hope they end up caring how the story pans out.
Are there any plans for what comes next after the show has finished its run – for you or the show?
Katie: We’ll continue performing around the Southwest. We have another show at the end of August in Bristol at the Alma Tavern – check out our Instagram to find out our future moves!
If your show had a soundtrack what songs would definitely be on it?
Katie: My favourite song to include on social media posts whenever we advertise Video Store is ‘Movies’ by Alien Ant Farm – an unintentional theme tune for the show!
What is the weirdest or most unconventional prop used in your show?
Colin: We basically have one prop. It’s a homemade VCR, made from cardboard. Actually, we also have a range of VHS cases as well. It’s all to give the vibe of a video store (don’t worry, for audience members below 30 we always start by explaining what a video store is).
If budget or reality was not an issue, what’s the one piece of scenery/set you’d love to have in your show?
Colin: Maybe we’d get a real VCR.
Many thanks to Colin and Katie for giving us a tour of their Video Store. The show plays The Courtyard Theatre from Monday 4 to Thursday 7 August.
