Review: The League of Improv, Phoenix Arts Centre

The League of Improv returns for another monthly show, part of an ongoing series in which a guest stand-up comedian — on this occasion Morgan Rees — effectively emcees the night. Rees chats to audience members, extracting information and jokes, which the improvisers then use as the basis for a series of short improvised sketches. It is a fun night that involves everyone.

The Phoenix Arts Club provides the perfect casual setting: a long room with tables and sofas stretching all the way back, where people can get up to go to the bar, drift in and out, and where even the bar staff are watching and laughing.

On this night in particular, everything seemed to fall into place for the League. Rees is excellent in his role: his charm is the glue that holds the night together. He is able to get something amusing even from those who make it very clear they don’t want to be talked to, and this always feels cheeky rather than mean.

Tonight’s audience also plays a huge part in the success of the evening. The classic crowd-work question “What do you do for a living?” is enough to make a regular stand-up-goer mentally switch off, but here it produces some juicy answers. There’s a man who works in an all-male sex club, a manager on a construction site, and — if you’re collecting evil jobs — someone from Thames Water! Another even announces that he “makes vapes for teenagers”; he doesn’t vape himself.

Rees even speaks to my plus one. When asked what she does, she explains that she’s a print designer for women’s fashion. When he asks whether we’d know her work, she replies, “well… if you know, you’d know.” Rees amusingly takes offence at the implication that he wouldn’t, and from there the phrase takes on a life of its own. It generates a huge laugh when repeated by one of the improvisers in a sketch about trying to trademark “puma print” — so just black — and becomes an unofficial slogan for the evening, resurfacing when two other audience members repeat it under Rees’s questioning.

This speaks to how funny the audience members themselves are, and how much they help to propel the night forward. The building-site manager provides a strong callback to an earlier sketch about HR telling a couple they couldn’t kiss at their own wedding, by explaining that he does allow people to kiss at his place of work. This sparks a very funny scene about a man being hopelessly misled by his HR manager about who he is and isn’t allowed to kiss at work.

Using real audience stories as the foundation for the scenes is a smart choice. It means the show never asks you to suspend your disbelief too much: even when things get wacky, they remain anchored to something real that happened in the room.

All the improvisers in the group are skilled, some particularly so. The improvised scenes rarely drag, and even when a scene becomes a little lost or confused, the performers embrace and acknowledge the chaos. However, improv is by nature hit and miss, and while some of the strongest material arrives later in the evening, the show does feel a little long at two hours including an interval. They just about pull it off, though, ending on a high with a sketch built around a manager and employee in the audience who are both named David, resulting in a workplace where everyone is called David. It is a neat way to close the evening, allowing for a wealth of callbacks to moments from throughout the show.

Devised by The League of Improv

The League of Improve hold a monthly event at Phoenix Arts Centre.