With so much excellent improvisation at the Fringe, it must be difficult to compete. The concept of The One Hour Plays is an interesting one: 60 minutes to put together a ten minute show based entirely on audience suggestions, with costumes, props and even a publicity poster.The first 50 minutes of the show are taken up communally deciding every detail of the upcoming performance. The humble spectator takes the reins: from auditioning the actors to choosing a title. Throughout these shenanigans, a writer beavers away, turning our ideas into a professional script to be brought to life by a talented cast. Or at least, that’s the theory. Unfortunately, the performance suffered from two fatal flaws. Firstly, as you might have realised, this formula results in 50 minutes of the show relying on the performers’ ability to entertain the audience with no material to support them. Sadly they didn’t have this ability. None of the actors has much talent for improvisation and, as such, they fell back on the sort of exaggerated zeal traditionally associated with children’s television. Despite occasional laughs – many of which were at the expense of the props, hurriedly made out of cereal boxes and sticky tape - there was little to make this any more than a wait for the finale. Now, for us to forgive the first five sixths of the show, the short play at the end needed to be truly impressive. Secondly, and most fatally, however, there was literally nothing impressive about the resulting ten minutes of mayhem at all: it was just as chaotic, nonsensical, unfunny and pointless as you might expect for something completely unplanned.In defence of the actors, the problem wasn’t that they couldn’t act, it was that the overall point of the show was utterly confused. Given that it clearly wasn’t trying to be particularly interesting or profound, in order to be successful it had to be at least slightly funny. Yet with the lack of comic talent in the cast and only two of the performers even attempting humour, it was at best mildly entertaining and at worst, childish.
