IMPROVISATION ON ZOOM
On ZOOM on 20 November 2020
https://www.facebook.com/events/401589581206275/
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:****
This review published only on this Blog. KH
L-R: Luke Sorba & Pippa Evans in UnMute
In UnMute, close up on the zoom screen, we see two improvisers minds in a whirl as they conjure character, place and dialogue in a split second. It is a joy to behold!
Improvisors, Luke Sorba and Pippa Evans (Oliver Award winner), create a series of Zoom calls between two people. Off-screen, Paz, the ‘Voice of Reason’, feeds them characters and locations taken from audience suggestions in Chat and calls ‘Unmute” to start each new scene.
The first scene features Adam (Luke), a bookseller who calls Helen (Pippa) who is working in a sweatshop making leather trousers and is terrified she will be caught chatting on Zoom. She hilariously uses the Zoom screen to show her tiny fingers that help with the fine stitching.
In the second call, Helen (Pippa) then calls her social worker, Rupert (Luke), to discuss her current employment in the sweatshop. However, his incompetent advice and obviously dodgy duplicating of her passport, all lead to him admitting he is not a social worker but a former casino worker who was furloughed and retrained during the pandemic.
Rupert, (Luke) then speaks to an anxious woman is Picadilly Circus as she stands by the statue of Eros. and they reveal they are a couple and their conversation escalates into an argument about their marriage and his demands on her.
This same supercilious wife (Pippa) then talks to her unbearably over-confident, smug yoga teacher, Marco and they get mired in murky existential psychobabble. The improvisers minds create some riotous dialogue including him naming his yoga poses after types of pasta e.g. the Fettuccini. She then teases him with sexual innuendo about the Downward Dog.
The yoga teacher (Luke) in Hampstead calls a Scandi Noir detective, Lisbeth, (Pippa) in Stockholm to search for a missing person – his yoga student. She speaks in cryptic, odd English in an accent that is a collision of Swedish and Welsh, using strange and indirect allusions.
Finally, Lisbeth, the Scandi detective, calls Adam, the bookseller (Luke), to order books on dream interpretation. Her strange English expression and mad dreams and imagery prompt him to write his own book and her asks her to help him.
UnMute is a hoot to watch as the two improvisers, with great ease, weave a web of interconnected stories and finally make sense of this improvised world of characters
by Kate Herbert
No comments:
Post a Comment