Edinburgh Fringe 2024
ShakeItUp – The Improvised Shakespeare Show
ShakeItUp Theatre
Genre: Comedy, Improvised Theatre
Venue: Gilded Balloon
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
ShakeItUp Theatre provide a high octane, high quality, long form improv piece of theatre in the style of the great Bard, based around a set of random suggestions from the audience. Their skill in connecting the apparently unconnectable is an art in itself.
Review
Gilded Balloon’s Patter House 2nd Floor venue is rammed to bursting – not bad given it’s a Sunday lunchtime on the only sunny and warm day Edinburgh has seen this summer. Surely you’d have expected these people to be soaking up the rays rather than raising the roof with their raucous laughter at this high octane, high class, long form improv from those masters of the art, ShakeItUp Theatre?
But this audience made the right choice, witnessing a unique performance (this is improv, after all) of a play Shakespeare probably could have written, such was its complexity, confusion and the range and depth of its characters.
It’s full on, right from the opening announcement aimed at revving up the audience, which grabs their attention, allowing the cast to weave an exquisite and laugh out loud story through ideas from the those present. Well, almost.
They say that you can generate the response you want from an allegedly random survey by the way you frame the questions. Perhaps there were elements of this in the way that the two actors initially on stage quizzed the audience for their choice of play (comedy, tragedy or history) and then three key plot devices (person to whom you could relate, location and a number).
From the inevitable wall of sound that emanated from an audience clearly “up for it”, the ensemble (five actors and a very overworked musician) then created an amazingly engaging story that ran for nearly an hour without hesitation, repetition or deviation from the subject matter, to borrow a phrase from a well-known and loved BBC Radio 4 game show.
Our audience went for history (with its promise of romance and death) and came up with Joshua, The Sea Life Centre and 9 as its plot devices – plus a load of other random spraff that you assumed had passed the ensemble by until bits of it made a surprise appearance in a rhyming couplet at various random points in the show.
There are plenty of “improv” shows doing the rounds at this Fringe but surely none that involve the actors having to deliver the goods using iambic pentameter, that you think you recognise as original Bard text but, one or two aside, are clever adaptations, all designed to form a part of the tale the actors are frantically trying to weave, with the express aim of hitting a convincing denouement precisely fifty-five minutes after the chaos began.
Groanworthy puns assail us at regular intervals, all of which are somehow related to the developing plot. Lovers are requited, allegiances formed, Kings despised and dethroned, monsters from the deep dealt with, battles fought, tyrants overthrown, all with laughs aplenty and a display of consummate character acting (and overacting) from a universally strong cast. Credit too, to our much overworked musician, providing improv accompaniment to complement the action unfolding on stage. In true Shakespearian style of course.
This stuff ain’t easy. Improv is a skill that takes much learning and tight teamwork to deliver. You need to be able to speak whilst thinking of your next line, all the time staying on the plot and making sure you cue in the next actor at the appropriate point, preferably having nudged the plot forward a bit, provided a few laughs and not taken the whole thing down a rabbit hole. And you need to have a phenomenal memory to take on board and then incorporate the random ideas expressed earlier by the punters paying to watch you both create and perform.
This can only come through practice, practice and then, just when you think you’re making progress, practice a bit more. ShakeItUp Theatre have clearly followed that mantra to the letter and absolutely nail it.
Bang on time, the denouement arrives, delivered with conviction and aplomb, cueing up the richly deserved, thunderous applause from an audience that had lived the show with the actors and laughed long and hard throughout.
This is top quality improv. ShakeItUp Theatre come highly recommended for the quality of their acting, their creativity and energy, their lexicon and the absolute guarantee that you’ll never see anything quite like it again. Ever.
