Monkey Toast

CHAT          IMPROV          WOMEN          UNEXPECTED

     It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Fringe show must be in want of an audience. Since the best form of advertising seems to be word of mouth, it makes sense to promoters to give out a small number of free tickets in the initial stages of a show's run, so that seats are filled, laughs shared, and memories made. In these early stages it is therefore worthwhile for an audience member to not have a plan, to go out of an evening and see what you may stumble upon, even if it ends up being just a cheeky pint in the shadow of a huge up-turned cow.
     On just such a night, a friend and I stumbled into Monkey Toast: the Improvised Chat Show, imported from Canada by David Shore. The format of such a show seemed alien at first (which helped to make it all the more intriguing) and really lent itself to the whole getting-bums-on-seats idea, but seemed to contain some kind of mix between chat and improv, though the adherent between the two was a mystery.
     After a few minutes' chat between our host and his guests of an evening, who change each night, we find ourselves in posession of some new, potentially hilarious information about said guest. When he seems satisfied, Shore sits back and says, with all the grace and authority of Whose Line's Clive Anderson, "with that in mind, let's see some comedy..."
     What follows is an improvised scene or two featuring a rolling cast of actors from elsewhere in the Fringe- Sara Pascoe is by turns an ante-natal monkey-mother instructor, an irate blogger and an animatronic model made of Little Richard's bones. Dylan Emery hangs up his Showstopper! The Musical garb for a night to become a fawn in Sarnia (it's in Canada, apparently). From the minor details of the guests' lives come a myriad different spin-off realities and scenes within them, leaving the interviewee squirming more than just a little.