“These performances may contain absolutely anything, but nothing is intended to cause harm.” Thus reads a disclaimer for the current Improv Festival running at BATS. It’s probably tongue in cheek – but in these PC days, who knows?

I’m in the Heyday Dome to watch The New Tales of Quinn. Next to me in the back row are a couple of young parents who tell me their offspring are upstairs attending an improvisation workshop. Like me, these two want to have a bird’s eye view of the audience’s reaction – the audience being composed mainly of a bunch of kids in the front few seats.

Cam Percy, from Australia, has created this show. She takes the part of story teller, a mixture of MC and narrator, and there are four other performers – Sam Irwin, Jennifer O’Sullivan, Clare Kerrison, Katherine Weaver – and and a keyboarder: Liam Kelly. 

We meet the Quinn of the title and she plunges us straight into a story. This is a novel tweak to the rather more conventional immediate request for input from the audience. That input is asked for as the show goes along, and it’s nicely judged, not overdone. 

If there’s a theme to the three vignettes we get, it’s an interesting one: the choice between a good action by one of the characters and an evil one. Our juvenile audience urges evil. Should I feel disconcerted? But it’s theatre – as I’m relieved to be reminded on hearing the pantomime familiarity of “Look behind you.”

We get some delightful characters, my favourite being a baby unicorn, who has good reasons for not growing up. “Don’t tell people how to parent,” he glooms. Another character is a trend setter, or trail blazer, and his philosophy is, “If you want it, you’ll never be it.”

The show is definitely enhanced, not only by the music, but by some wildly inventive costumes and the onscreen projection of drawings that suit the action. And the action is improvisation at its best – delightfully madcap, well worded and delivered with alacrity.

The kids love it.

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