It’s the final show of an NZ Improv Festival. There is a way these things go.  

A stage full of improvisers, hand picked from the scores who have attended the festival, mildly exhausted and determined to celebrate more than a week of workshops, performances, and socialising, and to pump one last shot of joyful chaos into their veins. An audience which is dominated in numbers, and overwhelmed in spirit, by other improvisers in exactly the same frame of mind. It tends to go off the rails — not to crash, but to take flight.

That happens. The effect is only enhanced by the way even starting, let alone completing, a week-and-a-bit event feels like snatching spontaneity from the jaws of 2021.

MC (and Festival Director) O’Sullivan explains that NZ vs The World: Bubble Edition (originally conceived during the travel bubble with Australia) is now a three way battle between Team North Island (Alayne Dick, Stevie Hancox-Monk, Wiremu Tuhiwai and Tara McEntee), Team South Island (Trubie-Dylan Smith, Brendon Bennetts, Emma Brittenden and Ciarán Searle), and people from The World who happen to be here anyway, Team Diplomat (Pajá Neuhoferová, Ben Jardine, Jerome Cousins and Liz Butler). Each player leads their team through a scene inspired by their own ‘world’; the audience’s favourite scene for each round gets one point.

A few of the things that ensue are: a bunch of men having to pretend to be into Sex and the City; eternal life at the cost of indirectly killing a mermaid; a scene in the style of the apparently actual genre ‘a movie where a pro wrestler is cast as someone with a tough job whose heart is softened by having to look after a child’; someone stage kissing their own husband; an attempt to guess everyone in the audience’s middle names; and competitive, arrestingly unsuccessful efforts to explain what a zoologist is.

Team South Island’s scene in the decisive final round is a good example of how things have increasingly played out. Earlier, when his team sought audience suggestions for things boys might not know about, Brendon Bennetts vetoed Jane Austen by pointing out he was an actual English teacher. So he announced his scene would be an entirely authentic Austen style experience. In practice, his setup went something like this: 

Bennetts: Our scene begins just before the final…
Dylan-Smith: [interrupting] … battle?
Bennetts: …
Audience: BAT-TLE! BAT-TLE! BAT-TLE! 

Players had been joining other team’s scenes with increasingly unstoppable generosity and now everyone dives in for the ball – which commences with the participants politely ignoring the charred remains from the earlier, non-final battle. So it happens to be South Island’s Ciarán Searle and North Island’s Tara McEntee forming the couple whose scandalous elopement now devolves into a series of physical and poetical duels ending in regretful self-sacrifice. 

It is after this scene that McEntee, apparently detecting which way the wind is blowing, defects to Team South Island. Scorekeeper Matt Powell (still in character as the host from Thursday’s Your Extraordinary Life) announces she has taken her quarter share of one point with her.

Another highlight, earlier in the final round, is Team North Island’s song about a rotten blueberry, which sees the two-piece band (Matt Hutton and Roger Sanders) come to the fore after ably accompanying the action throughout the night, with a tone-perfect 80s power ballad. 

It isn’t enough to beat the Austen. After the final vote (and some early bonus points scattered around the room) the scores are:
Team North Island on half a point;
Team Diplomat, MC O’Sullivan, the band, and the tech crew (including Bethany Miller on lights) all tied on one point; and
Team South Island on two and a half.

Then Brittenden somehow convinces the entire theatre to celebrate Team South Island’s victory by singing along to an actual anthem that was composed for the ‘100th or maybe 125th’ anniversary of the town of Rangiora. 

And so ends the 2021 NZ Improv Festival.

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