Shellshock: The Improvised Pantomime – Reviewed

My interest in Shellshock goes back to the heady days of the last Edinburgh Festival. A fresh and naive young reviewer I was packed off to see their show and told something like ‘it’s an improvised comedy group; they probably won’t be very good!’ Happily for me the show was not bad at all and I was glad that I could write a generally positive review about some of my colleagues from Durham.

So I was looking forward to the ‘Improvised Pantomime’, I reminded those friends and acquaintances who rubbished Shellshock that I had seen them before and had been impressed. Unfortunately if I was honest about their show in Edinburgh I must also be honest about this one. For me, this really, really, really, did not work. Almost everything about it hit rock bottom.

First off the group seemed to have abandoned the notion of it being a pantomime (what a brilliant concept! All the games they could play!) from the word go. The idea was not explored in any depth at all, instead the show felt like any other improv show with a standard storyline interspersed with under-energised improv games, even the tinsel only came out in the last scene!

Clarity, energy, character, articulation, physicality, timing, spacing, corpsing… the list of problems this unfortunate cast have goes on. In a particularly low point of the show the actors even managed to drop one of their colleagues face down onto the hard Assembly Rooms floor. Energy was all over the place with some scenes moving so slowly even fiddling with my pencil became dull. That said, there were one or two redeeming features that would merit this show at least a star. Zachary Cave stood out for me as the actor with the most ability and he did deliver one or two lines that genuinely made me smile, my favourite being his definition of magic as ‘like science but with less explanation’.

As I understand it, the trick to performing good improv is the ability to come up with exciting ideas at speed (with Shellshock you can literally see the cogs sputtering and dying), never ever blocking another actor (they did this so frequently it became the norm, it was quite an event when one member of the troupe actually went with another’s idea) and, crucially, recognise when an idea is not as convincing as it first seemed and abandoning it quickly, (in the ‘Improvised Pantomime no quality control seemed evident at all).

In the words of one of the unhappy troupe ‘if you like Doctor Who then you’ll like this crap’. A fitting epitaph for a disappointing production.