Monkey Toast's chat show is the Pleasance's late-night forum for comics to plug their shows and there's nothing wrong with that – in fact, publicity has rarely been so much fun. The format is an intriguing if at times awkward mash-up: every night amiable Canadian host David Shore briefly interviews Pleasance comics, in this case Gareth Morinan, Thomas Nelstrop, Suki Webster and Mike McShane about their current escapades. Based on ideas or potential scenes that have been thrown up by the interview, the Monkey Toast improv troupe perform improvised sketches until it's time to return to the business at hand again. This is a likeable evening and the Monkey Toast players are a very decent improv group, but it doesn't entirely hang together.
For one thing, the suggestions don't come from the audience but from the guests, which for me at least removes one of the principal points of improvised comedy. We are of course assured that the performers haven't been told what will be in the interview, but it still removes the mystique of completely spontaneous invention, rather like a magician selecting pre-picked assistants for his tricks. Also the format of the games played is unclear: we aren't told the rules of the improv in question, so performers occasionally interrupt the scene to show something that happened before it, or keep playing the same character as another performer before them without it being obvious. In a standard improv show, the rules of the different games and the performers' desperate attempts to stay within them are part of the entertainment; in this undefined free-form improv there are no boundaries to make the sudden switches intelligible and funny.
Even so, Store's banter with the guests is good and the laughs are plentiful. Monkey Toast may fall into the improv trap of the surreal a little too often, but it is brilliantly surreal: Paul McCartney in a tiger pit, the Queen as the girl in “The Exorcist”, a song by the “Tall Pricks” association about how awful it is to be very tall and arrogant. I very much enjoyed Sara Pascoe's gormless nitwits and Rob Broderick's thunderously brash interjections. It isn't the most slick improv you'll see at the Fringe, but by 11pm it doesn't matter too much. A good bet after a couple of pints for anyone wondering what to see tomorrow night.
