Liverpool improv group Impropriety took to the stage of the Kazimier last night for the inaugural presentation of their newly formed group. Familiar faces were certainly present on stage and in the audience with the event’s programme highlighting the inclusion of many members of the 2008 minute improv marathon and student improv group Purple Circle into a cast which numbered some 20 performers.

For Liverpool residents who have not been to the Kazimier, it is certainly well worth a visit. Nestled in Wolstenholme Square next to the Nation night club, Jorge Pardo’s colourful sculpture ‘Penelope’ and opposite the Pleasure Rooms strip bar, it is a venue run by The Arts Organisation, a group dedicated to artistic squatting of sorts, “enabling the legal occupation of disused spaces” as they express it on the Property Solutions section of their website. You will know them, probably, as the folk who run the TAO Gallery on Slater Street and the very well known Mello Mello.

The Kaz, as it is known amongst my friends, is an incredible night club space, apparently abandoned and resurrected by The Arts Organisation into one of Liverpool’s most flexible arts venues. As a club-night venue it appeals to Liverpool’s alternative scene, hosting extravagant fancy dress evenings. As a theatre venue, it has received a number of small independent productions and its multi-leveled interior has given directors a lot to play with.

Last night saw the venue fully tabled with the stage at one end, a formation which worked well as it meant the various levels could be used to give the audience a view of the stage. As an audience member I was not too impressed, having paid as much as everyone else to get into the venue, to be told that there were no more seats left and that I should find somewhere around the venue to perch. Perching as I was at the back of the auditorium may have been fine if the performance had not run for 3 hours, with the entire event going up at least 15 minutes late.

The night’s format gave plenty of opportunity for the performers to show off. In three acts the group managed to at least play fleeting lip service to just about every genre of improv theatre. The first act of the evening took a Theatresports format, with groups battling each other for points awarded both for their completion of improv tasks and for style from a panel of judges. There were some laugh out loud moments in this hour long stint of improv games, as there were throughout the performance, but the entire thing seemed to take about three times as long as it should.

The performers appeared to take a while to warm up, disappointing given the size of the audience they had to bounce off, and the energy never seemed to reach the critical mass needed to keep one gag flowing into another. Our host for the evening, Ian Hayles, did his best to get the audience in the mood, playing around with rounds of applause before bringing the massive cast on stage, but the heckles from the lively Scouse audience seemed to throw him off more than they should. A dedicated scorer for the Theatresports section of the night may have made the comedy flow more easily than the frequent attempts at maths allowed.

The middle section saw Show Off! demonstrate their musical improvisation skills. With suggestions having been taken from the over capacity crowd before the lights went down, the group had a lot of audience material to work with for their take on a musical theatre award ceremony. The format worked well and the group showed off their best voices excellently. Particularly of note were Kenny Thompson and Lauren Silver whose number from the audience suggested ‘Abattoir, The Musical’ managed to hit as many meat jokes as one can imagine. The group’s final musical number was set like all of the worst musicals often are – on ice. The performers picked up on this meaning they would have to mime skating about the stage, an action with nothing but comic potential, but missed that they did not have to sing about the fact they were skating. Maybe few of them have been unlucky enough to sit through any Disney ice spectaculars.

The third act took the same format as the first, however more of the performers graced the stage at the same time, giving the whole thing a bit of a messy appearance. Again, I would have loved to see the entire thing take about half as much time as it did. It was here that we saw both the potential of what Impropriety will hopefully present in future and the reality of what they were able to bring to Saturday evening. Trevor Fleming showed in a brief two handed outing with Lee McPherson what the group can pull out of the bag. Taking the unfortunate situation of a child suffering from leukaemia on a day out with his Dad, the scene was irreverently funny, raising the stakes for both the relationship between the two characters on stage and the actors with their audience. It was genuinely funny, leaving you wondering just how far they were prepared to push the comedy and tantalisingly close to making the show up paced and engaging. The rest of the third act trundled to a finish, with the entire cast getting their own opportunity for a bit of musical improvisation with the closing number.

I think it was more than just the fact I was left standing against the back wall of the auditorium for the duration of the performance that made me think the night had gone on too long. The group are obviously familiar with the long format that improv comedy can take: I have watched two of their associated improvathon performances and have been impressed with the results. The launch night of this new group however, should have been a short, snappy, high energy performance, not the marathon we were presented with.

The group will return for The Last Resort, The 2o10 Minute Improvathon set in a 1950’s summer camp on 10 and 11 April at the Kazimier, which should be well worth a watch. The event last night was a launch and as a starting point they have certainly put a stake in the ground for both production values and the size of audience they can attract. I think the quality of the output over all can only rise with time, the individual members have certainly demonstrated on previous outings what they are capable of. I look forward to seeing it once it has reached its full potential.

Photo credit: Hdod on Flickr

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Liverpool, Theatre Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.