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Remember when the great weekly Anglo ritual ‘Boardgame Night’ used to have families worldwide enraptured before the Digital Age robbed us of our thumb tips and social skills? Well, the team who brought us Ultimate Scrabble are back to thrust Trivial Pursuits et al once again into mainstream family life. Change the living room for the Imperial Hotel Melbourne and Daddy’s single brandy for a skinful of beer and there you’ll have the Ultimate Board Game, half comedy, half nostalgia but fully unscripted. Sounds boring? Well, from the moment a boot landing on Park Lane prompts Prince Charming to ask Canadian Cinderella if she likes ‘chewing down on Beaver’, you’ll soon realise this ain’t your Mommy’s Monopoly, son.

The show plays out as a series of improvised scenes inspired by audience responses to questions posed by a largely innocuous compere about some family favourites. Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, Taboo and Cluedo all get a run out, while a single game of Boggle with the audience is plumbed 3 times for keywords on which to base a scene.

Disregarding a nervy starting Boggle game, where the players awkward improv succeeds more in drawing titters from themselves than the audience, and the best forgotten Pictionary round which shows little inspiration, the players display a refreshingly inventive approach to improvisation, their combining talents and sense of humour keeping the audience suitably amused. Balderdash gives us ‘Scopulation’, and a hilarious depiction of a redback spider’s pre-date ritual, complete with exploding pustules and a very adult fluid innuendo that had the audience hooting with embarrassed but raucous laughter.

Unfortunately, these moments of outright hilarity are a little too few and far between, the weight resting firmly on the ‘polite’ side of the laughter see-saw for the most part. For, while a great deal of the improvisation is sharp and very clever, these two elements don’t always equal funny. At points the audience was visibly bristling for a good belly-laugh, generally anticipating the return of a particular two players to the fold. Lee Naimo and Jon Williams were undoubtedly the stars of the night, using sheer warped imagination and excellent deadpan delivery to lift the scene every time it began to fail. Seizing almost total control in firstly Boggle and then Monopoly, their screwball visions of feasting on dead seagulls and Cinderella as a mountie coupled with some sublime physical stylings breathed fresh air back into the performance on numerous occasions. Only in the penultimate Hungry Hippo segment did every comedian truly draw adulation from the crowd, aided no doubt by the marshmallows that the suddenly vibrant compere was stuffing intermittently into their mouths.

To try and accurately review a show that by it’s very nature could change from scene to scene, moment to moment and audience to audience is hard, but I’m betting not as hard as climbing onstage without a script and making the instant gratification, youtube generation laugh themselves to tears. For all the shortcomings of the show when things aren’t going right, for the moments that generally did crease me in two like a folded board, well, they should be congratulated for that.

Not the most polished performance to ever grace the Comedy Festival stages, but much more fun than a night round the Boggle box.


Impro Australia presents
The Ultimate Board Game - Unscripted

Venue: Imperial Hotel* | Cnr Bourke & Spring Sts, Melbourne
Dates: 1 - 18 April, 2010
Times: Tue - Sat 9.30pm, Sun 8.30pm
Duration: 55 minutes
Prices: Full $22, Concession $17, Tightarse Tuesday $16
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 660 013 | At the door
Visit: http://www.doubledog.com.au

* Licensed venue. Under 18s must be accompanied by a Parent or Legal Guardian.