For the one-night-only Celebrity Theatresports show, St Kilda’s grand old National Theatre was packed with a rambunctious crowd keen to see performers flying by the seat of their pants and creating comedy on the spot. The show consisted of four teams of four actors each, and the performers were a mix of experienced improvisers and celebrities from other fields, supported by a keyboardist, MCs, stagehands and judges. The audience delighted in the opportunity to yell out suggestions, grasped for the lollies that was thrown to it, and booed the judges when they gave low scores.

A variety of different games were played, from a subtitling game in which one person provides the voices for all the other actors in the scene, to four-person improvised poetry.

Celebrity guests such as Neighbours stars Sam Clark (Ringo) and Matthew Werkmeister (Zeke) appeared a little bewildered but performed admirably. Of the experienced improvisers, Rebecca De Unamuno (Comedy Inc.) was the real stand-out – outshining Rusty from the Scared Weird Little Guys in a song-based game is no mean feat.

It’s a bit of a shame that a lot of the segments weren’t traditional Theatresports games; just a prompt and a scene gives the performers almost too much freedom, leaving them floundering where a tiny bit more structure would have allowed them to create a tighter scene.

Still, going to see impro is necessarily an unpredictable experience. Given performers more familiar with the games and with each other, you might just witness unrepeatable brilliance – so it’s probably worth checking out one of Impro Melbourne’s regular nights … minus the celebrities.

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