The Bear Pack (Carlo Ritchie and Steen Raskopoulos) are quickly building a reputation as some of Australia’s most talented comedians. At their sold out Sydney Fringe Festival performance, they proved exactly why. The Bear Pack shows are entirely improvised. Start to finish, they have an entire hour on stage to fabricate a coherent story from a word given by the audience, and on top of that, they are expected to make it funny. ‘Difficult’ is probably the understatement of the century.

The night opened with special guests, The Improv Soap Opera, an improvisational troupe who played out a high school soap opera based on a crises selected by the audience. Tonight, it was a “stapler shortage”. The plot had very little to do with the actual crisis in the end – but that didn’t stop it from being an excellent show. Susie Yousseff was a stand out as ‘Lana Del Pray’, a former religious student who had lost her way (and her sexual modesty). Edan B Lacey was also responsible for many of the laughs as a recently gender re-assigned Principal, and was often so quick with quips the audience’s laughter lagged behind, while William Erimya elicited a similar reaction with merely a well-timed look. There were, as you’d expect, a few moments that fell flat or plots that made little sense – but the humour of improv seems to lie in the failures as much as the successes.

Next up, it was The Bear Pack’s absurd, off-beat, quick-fire comedy. It’s a style of improv unique to Ritchie and Raskopoulos, and given how left of centre it gets, it’s a testament to their skill that the entire room was laughing. Starting with a setting (a golf course) and a nightshade vegetable, the journey began. Much of the brilliance of the show is in the almost psychic synergy between the two – they are masters of set-ups that are undetectable until the punch line. They aren’t afraid to stuff up or play games with each other onstage. When Raskopoulos holds a two fingered ‘gun’ in Ritchie’s mouth he replies that it is “extremely unsanitary” and from then on Raskopoulos takes every opportunity to stick his finger-gun in Ritchie’s mouth.

It’s the kind of comedy that has to be experienced live. The audience feels involved in the story, and like Whose Line Is It Anyway?, often “the plot doesn’t matter”. This doesn’t stop The Bear Pack doing an excellent job of tying up almost all the loose ends. But perhaps the best part is question time at the end, when the audience can ask about plot holes that Ritchie and Raskopoulos must then act out to reach a  conclusion. It’s not just funny, it’s impossibly clever. You laugh as much at the jokes at the surprise that they can actually pull this thing off.

The Bear Pack with  guests The Improv Soap Opera, have regular shows at the Giant Dwarf Theatre. They also recently announced the launch of the Improv Theatre Sydney, with classes for beginners and intermediate improvisers starting this October.

Reviewed by Emily Meller

The lights go up to reveal Lynette in a floor length skirt and cardigan, hastily scooping up empty wine bottles from another lonely bender. Meet Aunty Lyn – the archetype of every crazy relative who has ever forced you to sit through a long conversation about their bowel surgery and worrying bladder leaks over dinner. The opening soundtrack, ‘Que Sera’, encapsulates the type of ‘modern’ spinster Aunty Lynette represents. The kind who will polish off a bottle of wine, lament her barren uterus and gleefully cast herself in the lead role of the tragedy that is her life.

Taylor Owynns possesses the stage whenever she is performing. She is pitch perfect in the psychotic mood swings of Lynette, delivering lines like “we can be like two happenin’ gals in this big crazy city…” with a sad self-awareness that elicits humour and pity in equal measure. Meanwhile Sasha Dyer’s best moments are often reactionary, whether through a well-timed glance towards the audience or a self-deprecating aside (“can’t wait for the money to start flowing in from my poetry blog”).

The funniest moments are in the back-and-forth exchanges between them, when a pause is worth a thousand words. The entrance of Tom the caretaker (Dave Kirkham) provides interest and an extra dash of weirdness, but his constant references to “the age of entitlement” being over grow a little tiresome. Still, there is no denying that a man in his underwear and leather chaps is going to make you laugh.

The political references that boil down to the clichéd ‘young people vote Greens, old people vote Liberal’ detract from the production’s real centre. The humour is finding something to love in our most selfish and absurd relatives, and Aunt Agony manages to touch on some great observations (and plenty of laughs) when it steers true.

Aunt Agony was part of the Sydney Fringe Festival’s theatre program. More information about the production can be found at the New Theatre website.

Reviewed by Emily Meller

Though we have gained clarity, logic and efficiency with the development of modern English, we have also lost one of the greatest pleasures of language: flowery, nonsensical, several-lines-long insults. The Post-Haste Players’ entirely improvised Bard to the Bone excels at taking the best bits of Elizabethan English and spinning them into amusing and insulting new contortions.

Billed as “the play Shakespeare wished he had written”, you’d be forgiven for expecting a morose evening of complex literary references and a slew of tragic deaths. But, you’d be wrong. This is primarily an improvisation game, with a plot that centres on something brand new each night. For us, a “shrimp peeler” provided the dramatic action.

As you might expect, a Shakespearean-style play about a shrimp peeler is bound to takes some bizarre twists. With only a few stools for props, and an excellent live soundtrack provided by Bryce Halliday, a truly disturbing world unfurled on stage. It begins when a prawn prophesies the rise of the “prawn people”, while a “fair maiden” grapples with being forced into a marriage despite her heart belonging to a mysterious “bearded man”.

What the plot lacks in logic is more than made up for by the players’ wit and dramatic talents. Ewan Campbell, the bearded lover, showcases an acerbic sense of humour with lines such as “it’s like a chicken wrapped in leather and sent to walk down a plank,” delivered with delightfully rolled ‘r’s and a wry smile.  Oliver Burton as the evil prince Marcus Malcom Markam (or occasionally Malcom Malcom Markam) brought a serious dose of absurdity, transfiguring into a “prawn man” that could have come straight out of The Mighty Boosh.

If you were expecting pointed insights into the Bard and his characters, you won’t find them here. Besides a couple of references, like the fact that the arras (or curtain) is so “often the place of betrayal”, the performance has very little to do with Shakespeare’s actual plays. But for audiences who are sick of Hamlet’s whining anyway, this is an entertaining and insult-laden show by some highly skilled improvisation actors.

You can buy tickets to the final performance of Bard to The Bone now,  and follow the Post-Haste Players through their Facebook page.

Reviewed by Emily Meller.