Creator: Insert Laughter Here Theatre Company
Improvisation is such a difficult art form, heavily reliant on what the actors are given to work with and their own skill in drawing out comic opportunities from those scenarios. Theatre company Insert Laughter Here have devised an innovative methodology for creating their show, filling in a giant wheel with play, film or television genre suggestions and, by spinning the wheel allows the hand of fate to decide which style they will adopt. Spin-a-Play! performing on its final day at the Camden Fringe 2025 gets a raw deal from its matinee audience, leaving the six performers struggling to fulfil their brief.
The show begins with the primary sequences of audience interaction, and much like Whose Line is it Anyway asks the viewer to shout out suggestions. We are gathered to help narrator and master of ceremonies Aaron to write an award-winning play, and as co-writers, it is the audience’s job to pick a genre, then some of the key characteristics that the show must deliver and finally to give this improvised play a title. Despite receiving plenty of promising suggestions, including cops and robbers, war and horror, the wheel alas lands on a hybrid Dickens / Shakespeare concoction, much to the dismay of the performers who nonetheless give it a go.
What follows has some structure, Aaron taking notes of audience ideas and ensuring the plot delivers on as many of them as possible while also determining the length of scenes, calling for moments of pause while new ideas are inserted and attempting to control any drift. Inevitably, with improv where the material is challenging, to fill the time, the scenes do go on a little too long, and with Aaron in charge, not all of the actors are as adept at maintaining the brief on their own.
It isn’t easy for them as they try to mesh a Dickensian exploitative factory setting with a twins-in-disguise plot, but the initial silliness does result in fewer laughs as the need to please the audience overrules the opportunities for comedy, and there is a sense of just getting through it and finding a way of wrapping it up.
But the company are game – Chris Adlem, Jen Anderson, Jordan Peck, Mark Taylor, Joseph Betts and Aaron Weight – and the creativity has moments of real spark including the evil factory biscuit factory owner Mr Whitworth being visited by three burlesquing ghosts in order to change his ways and unexpected demands for character soliloquies which push their skills even further. Somehow, thanks to the randomness of the audience, they also manage to fit in an exorcism, a couple of pop songs with altered lyrics and the challenge for one actor of playing two characters within the same scene, which leads to unexpected spooky possession.
The wheel does make a second appearance to momentarily change genres, but it’s a shame not to use the device more throughout, especially as the apparatus took two weeks to make. Improvisation is actually only as good as its audience allows it to be, and on this occasion, Insert Laughter Here might want to spin again. Hopefully, a different audience for their final show will give them far more to work with.
Reviewed on 16 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
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