Improv the Dead at Camden Fringe

As soon as you enter the theatre, Improv the Dead are creeping about the space either eating the ‘brains’ of a corpse on stage or thrown haphazardly amongst the audience trying to find more pray. As the lights go up and the music starts they crawl and stagger towards the stage before switching back into the living and introducing themselves as Improv The Dead, a film collective that have made various movies. Players flash through three examples of past movies they’ve made as a way to warm up the audience with suggestions. 

Then it’s time to move onto the main event, the improvised zombie apocalypse. To kick off the director, Tim Dawkins asks for a suggestion of a place you’d want to go to in a Zombie apocalypse. This is followed by, unsurprisingly, the place you’d least like to be when it all kicks off which is where the sequence begins. The suggestions during their Camden Fringe shows were from Camden Market to a silent disco and a morgue to a castle. Improv the Dead take us on a journey from one place to another whilst introducing subplots, directors cuts and a whole lot of zombie (and human) deaths.

As soon as you enter the theatre, Improv the Dead are creeping about the space either eating the ‘brains’ of a corpse on stage or thrown haphazardly amongst the audience trying to find more pray. As the lights go up and the music starts they crawl and stagger towards the stage before switching back into the living and introducing themselves as Improv The Dead, a film collective that have made various movies. Players flash through three examples of past movies they’ve made as a way to warm up the audience with suggestions.

Advertising for Improv the Dead promises zombies and they don’t fail to disappoint as the beginning of the story kicks off with a fast montage of brutal zombie killing and deaths as the cast get nice and bloody. The montage shows how practiced the cast are in finding different objects to kill zombies and is a lovely way to transition into the show.

What stands out in this format is how any of the cast are able to step forward and break the forth wall by pointing out their roles within the film collective and asking for more suggestions of things that could happen within the scene. This allows a more playful aspect to an already strong narrative group. During their Camden Fringe run they were able to repeat a death scene in slow motion to the entire cast singing “I kissed a girl” by Katy Perry, highlight an off stage conflict between two actors, highlight a lack of budget for certain scenes, improvise a rap which was then repeated with a TikTok dance and allude to famous actors having cameo roles. Another example of play was during a scene where a waterslide was mentioned within the mansion of a rich brat (who seemed to want nothing more in the apocalypse than to party), one of the cast stepped forward to explain that the filming of this was during a very hot day and the only way they could get all the actors to do any work was to let them all go down the slide. Which they did and the scene continued on as every single one of improv the dead (including characters who had already been killed during the show) had a turn going down the slide.

The cast are also excellent at finding the game of the scene and calling back to previous aspects of the show. During one of the nights Jeeves, an evil butler, had been working in the castle for many years. As the show went on his references to previous centuries included earlier and earlier dates.

Improv the Dead run a monthly night and improv jam at the Old Queens Head in Piccadilly Circus, info here.