"Spools". Burton Taylor

This review was written for Daily Information and appears on their website.

'The Skriker' had to cancel this week, raising the prospect of the Burton Taylor being briefly unoccupied. What to do to avert this tragedy? What play can be cast, rehearsed, learnt and mounted at three days' notice? 

Cops & Robbers, the improv group, to the rescue.

All this three-strong team have to work with is the basic idea that they're putting on a musical. Beyond that, at the outset of the show, they clearly have no idea where they're going. There's no script, no roadmap to follow. The only vehicle they have is their trust in each other.

What more do you need? Answer: nothing. 'Spools' is fifty minutes of ephemeral joy built on nothing more than a genuine commitment to and confidence in improvisation. It was pretty sobering fighting through the queues shuffling into 'Mama Mia' at the New Theatre round the corner, on the way to the BT this evening. How much does that show cost to stage every evening? £30k? 'Spools' makes do with a few scraps of forgotten costumes left behind by some other show, and creates an evening of genuine, heart-warming comedy.

It's not just the off-the-cuff plot creation that makes it fun. It's the way the performers repeatedly try and wrong-foot each other, knowing they can deal with it. And it's the corpsing, as they see themselves going down improvisational dead-ends, knowing there's nothing they can do about it - and that ultimately it doesn't matter.

Will they become tomorrow's comedy stars? Will they become tomorrow's hedge fund managers? Who knows? But for four days they did a favour for another show that couldn't go ahead, and that gesture alone demonstrated exactly what makes them work as improv performers: generosity.