Well known to Wellington audiences as Doom and Bloom, Ben Zolno and Brendan West have perfected the art of improv duets (including via Zoom), which focus on and develop individual personalities and the relationship between two players. Now they have gathered Improv Festival participants with experience ranging from weeks to decades to explore those principles in Duets.  

It’s a simple format where the fundamentals of improv – listening, responding and building on an idea – test the players’ skills. Brendan, operating the tech desk, judiciously fades the lights when a punchline or payoff is achieved. 

First Susan Howard and Ciarán Searle use the starting point of simultaneously saying something random, then interacting to bring the ideas together. So his complaint about “socks lying about all over the place” and hers about wanting “to get them bigger” sees one problem helping to test whether she would suit larger breasts. In the next phase, he “knew where it was this morning” while she has to “give up drinking.” Sadly it’s the bottle he tracks down and after much ‘will she or won’t she’ prevarication they revel in a drunken singalong. The third phase has a non-verbal beginning, involving comparison of their shoes. Bits of gibberish are employed as it emerges hers help her dance lightly while his trip him up – until he finds a handy way to acquire her talent. 

‘They fall in love at the end,’ is the asked-for film cliché Emma Maguire and Ben Zolno are tasked with getting to. To challenge themselves, they quickly establish that she hates his landscapes while he, aged 24, believes he has artistic integrity. It emerges that she, more senior, is paying megabucks for him to design an apartment complex and wants something simple, effective and lasting while he – who has a PhD in Architecture – believes the apocalypse is coming and the best thing to do is join with friends in vans to create a commune. It is interrogating the generational divide that flick the ‘love’ switch, despite her being single while he’s dating seven people.

Kitty Parker and Scott Sumby ask for a relationship, get ‘Dentist – Patient’ and opt for the three-act structure. First she is the farmer with a raging toothache and he promises she won’t feel a thing as he administers an intravenous sedative. But it’s him that’s woozy a few hours later – have they swapped roles, I wonder? He thinks she’s his Mum, she calls the doctor and is told it will take an hour to wear off.  

They opt for a whole new scenario involving something tiny on the floor which turns out to be a rare golden beetle that’s venomous and burrows into his veins. A tourniquet is required before, being out of cellphone range, they, commence the half hour walk to town. The lights fade and when they come back up she hails him as John, he recognises her as Ellen. It turns out he is an actor who is very big in the South Island, and he recited Bottom’s “shivering shocks” poem from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to prove his prowess. Revealed as his drama teacher at school, it transpire Ellen thought John was a mediocre drama student. But encouraged him nevertheless, he believed – and voilà! .

Having asked for a relationship and a problem, Paddy L Plunket and Andreas Kubisch become a teacher and student respectively with ‘not enough chocolate’ being the cause of him, as a young boy, being in trouble for reacting physically to little Timmy stealing his chocolate. Andy’s saving grace is his prowess at cricket – and in the second act he, now adult, is captain of a cricket team. When the question of whether Timmy’s mother’s desire for her boy to join the team can be indulged, it turns out the reason the teacher (Paddy) has shown such concern for Andy is that – yes – she is his mother. It is not until years later, in the third act, that the identity of his father is revealed: the Minister of Education no less.  

To add a sense of structure to the hour and help achieve a sense of closure, Andreas cleverly refers back to previous scenarios. Inevitably the results have been varied and the participants will learn a lot from the night. Nevertheless, it is absorbing for the audience to witnessing the magical manifestations from nothing of people, relationships and situations with the odd touch of backstory and worlds that resonate beyond their immediate realities. 

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