Burton Taylor

Tuesday 23rd – Saturday 27th February, 7.30p.m.

“The show was funny, but not gut-busting, it felt too amorphous and not quite weird enough.” Rebecca Whiteley ★★★★★

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IMPerium ★★★★★

Review by Rebecca Whiteley

‘Join us as we visit a place that has never before been seen’ say the Imps. If you’ve seen them at their regular spot at the Wheatsheaf then you probably have been somewhere similar. Although this is not necessarily a bad thing – the performers were as ingenious and hilarious as ever. IMPerium might be different from the Imps’ usual Who’s Line is it Anyway-style show, but only superficially; the performers were using all the same comedic techniques with great skill.

In improvisation you take the rough with the smooth and there were certainly enough genuinely hilarious moments in this show to balance out the dead spots. Most impressively, the performers managed to turn the inevitable mistakes and corpsing into some of the funniest jokes. They all sparked well off each other’s material and the extended narrative did allow them to build up a well developed cast of lunatic characters. It was, however, a lot to ask of improvisers, and the show suffered from the lack of a compère or a more rigid structure. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how well the show was concluded, it could easily have ponderously petered out. But the show lasted for an hour and a half and became slightly disconcerting in its lack of formative narrative structure. Unlike more diverse sketch comedy, I felt IMPerium really might have benefitted from a bit of scripting.

As a regular Imp-goer, I was disappointed by their new habitat at the Burton Taylor – the venue is too small and too formal for such a raucous event. The show felt like a slightly ill-conceived mixture of theatre and participatory comedy – the whole thing was a little too decorous. There was no audience warm-up and far too few people, so the imps had to start picking on audience members for suggestions, and the material they ended up with was inevitably mundane. That said, the Imps were undeterred, warmed quickly to their theme and were on excellent form – refreshingly, there were no weak links among the performers. The show was funny, but not gut-busting, it felt too amorphous and not quite weird enough. If you’re only going to see the Imps once – a foolish prospect in my opinion – I would have to suggest that you go to see their usual Monday show and give the not quite imperious IMPerium a miss.