At Lazy Susan’s Comedy Den in the Brisbane Hotel, Saturday nights are placed in the hands of Cut Snake Comedy and their improvised show, “The Big HOO-HAA!”. Having brought us the Eurotrash of “Improvision” at Fringe World 2012, this year the team has taken their inspiration from the works of William Shakespeare, to create the production “Shakesprovisation”.

Cast members circulate through the waiting crowd before the show, collecting object and adjective suggestions into skull-shaped pots. When combined with the result of a coin toss, the title of the play is determined, with that night’s being “The Most Esteemed Comedy of the Flighty Knickerbocker”. A random number shouted from the audience is added to the mix, which in this case meant that seven marriages were to occur before the show’s end.

Knickerbockers may have been interpreted as a type of lacey undergarment a woman might wear and the marriages all but forgotten until the last ten minutes or so, leading to some speedy romancing, but all of this just added to the absolute hilarity of what was occurring on stage.

This applies equally to the Shakespearean influence, which that night was mostly manifested in the show’s format and the peppering of the players’ dialogue with “doth”, “thou” and the suffix “–est” in both appropriate and inappropriate places.

The embracing of coincidence and overly elaborate plans that never should work suggested a lampooning of the Shakespearean formula, but whether this was purposeful or just a byproduct of the improvisation is difficult to deduce.

What is clear is that every member of the cast is a deft improviser, who enjoys what they do as much as the audience clearly was. If the rest of the performances maintain the standard set by the opening night, you would have to be as averse to pleasure as Malvolio to not have a riotous time.

Shakesprovisation ran until February 17 at Noodle Palace and was part of Fringe World 2013.