Theatresports Grand Championship (Impromafia)
Brisbane Powerhouse, Powerhouse Theatre
May 29

Theatre sports is a fast paced, action packed, competitive team-based theatre competition which combines wit, humour and performance skill. If you have seen improvisational comedy television shows like “Whose Line is It Anyway” you may think you know how it looks. If you have been lucky enough to experience the competition on stage, you know how much better it is to see performers making up scenes and games on the spot before your eyes (and at your suggestion) in a fun-filled night of spontaneous, never-to-be-repeated hilarity.
Featuring at the culmination of the Brisbane Comedy Festival, the one-show-only event that is Impromafia’s “Theatresports Grand Championships” sees the very best of Brisbane’s talent take on the cream of the interstate improv challenge crop in a celebration of quick wits. The show’s later Sunday timeslot means there are some loose suggestions from audience members united in their rambunctiousness, which only adds to the fun that is theatre sports – no script, only the spontaneous brilliance of its impromptu performers at the mercy at audience’s ‘should have said’ (for example) shoutouts to reconsider character statements.
The Queensland crew of humble hometown hosts (Carla Haynes, Luke Rimmelzwaan, Jaz Robertson and Wade Robinson) and Team Southerners (from Melbourne, Sydney, and New Zealand, Brendon Bennetts, Emma Brittenden, Bridie Connell, Jason Geary and David Massingham) are all incredibly talented, with clear talents for improvisation, imagination, characterisation and teamwork. Not only are they able to find the humour in anything at a moment’s notice, but they show the cleverness to remember scenes such as when an almost-minute-long scene is then replayed in 30 seconds and finally in a frantic seven second reduction. And then there are the call-backs that feature throughout the show, in this instance to Coolangatta and relationship retreats to France. Queensland also features as a recurring theme, not just in the home-grown humourists’ attire, but location and alike suggestions for skits, cresendoing in a quintessential Queensland drama, ‘The Miner’.
Each moment is unscripted, unfiltered, and unpredictable…. apart from when a scene unfolds around one character reading script lines for Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godo”, done so well that we quickly forget that this is even the case. Audience members even get in on the act, in a way, such as in a film noire retell of a front row couple’s Cavill Ave nightclub meeting many decades ago. There is certain something for everyone when the teams take to the Powerhouse main stage. With an improvised opera testament to morning coffee and a skit enlivened by audience members demanding that characters ‘sing about it’ at pivotal times (in this instance giving us a very unique Australian Kurt Cobain, Clean up Australia tribute, ‘90s style), there is even some musical moments, realised by Kris Anderson who similarly improvs his accompaniment according to the needs of each scene. And without disrupting from momentum, explanation is given to the setup of games, for those unfamiliar with format, by hosts Siobhan Finniss and Ryan Goodwin. as well as the teams themselves, which only enhances audience enthusiasm to engage with their set-ups.
Boo-ing, however, is reserved only for the judges, Leica Baker, Roger Beams and Alexander Simpkins, for while fierce battle for improv supremacy on-stage occupies most of our attention, the night’s judges play their part too, including in banter with audience members disapproving of their allocations. This year, it is Team Southerners who come up on top in the battle for improv supremacy, not that it really matters, for it is audience members who are the real winners, leaving abuzz thanks to their experience of the best of the best from Brisbane and beyond and the very random eventualities of their spontaneous storytelling – from a gothic horror story, complete with Banjo soundtrack to step-sibling breakups with strange strings attached.