Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Friends: Kool Story Bro
Berk's Nest
Genre: Comedy, Improvised Theatre, Storytelling
Venue: Pleasance Courtyard
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
A fun hour of improv with Kiell Smith-Bynoe and friends, entirely reliant on the whims of the night’s audience.
Review
The concept of Kool Story Bro is simple. Actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe (of Ghosts and Stath Lets Flats fame) brings along several friends and a celebrity guest star as host (on rotation every night) to present improv skits based on audience stories. Sometimes it works, and sometimes (by Smith-Bynoe’s own admission), it’s “dogshit.” It all depends on who’s in the audience.
The night we reviewed just so happened to be the two-year anniversary, and even though it took a while for the laughs to really get going, it had a strong final flourish. Host Jin Hao Li stole much of the thunder for the first half of the action, as his job was to talk to the audience and acquire said stories, whereas Smith-Bynoe and friends (of whom tonight’s roster included Lola-Rose Maxwell and Brendan Murphy) would then skit. To his credit, the audience were not at all willing – perhaps in late Fringe fatigue – and so Jin Hao literally had to prize an anniversary story from the front row.
As such, the anniversary story-based skit, named ‘Mansterdam,’ tended towards the dry side, with a Canadian Grand Prix story that veered dangerously away from relevancy. A second story, this time around birthdays, volunteered a few more hands, and a few better stories – ‘Another Bloody Surprise’ centred around a hitman attempting to take people out by planning a variety of surprise parties, each more complicated than the last.
The best was most certainly last, however, with the final story (theme: anything) ‘the sandwich in the forest,’ about a botched sandwich mugging by way of baboons. And based on a true story, no less. By then, the performers were in their element, and their final skit had people absolutely roaring with laughter.
Despite it’s slow start, Kool Story Bro is a novel concept, combining elements of storytelling and improv to create a Frankenstein’s mash-up of comedy, and shows off the evident improv skills of Smith-Bynoe and friends. The problem, though, herein lies in its structure. If the stories are good, then the show is fantastic. If the stories are less than good, well, caveat emptor.
