You never know what you might find in a second hand shop – could be trash, could be treasure – and the parallels with improvised theatre are immediately apparent. 

In Thriftshop Alice Canton directs a troupe of improvisers (April Seymore, Rik Brown, Katherine Weaver, Hamish Parkinson, Linda Calgaro, plus musicians Robbie Ellis and Roger Sanders) drawn from the numerous companies playing in the festival, and they create scenes inspired by a random assortment of props and costumes sourced from second-hand shops.

This premise is loose, and the show is looser. At the outset, the contract of engagement is not clear, and the open-ended provocation ‘costumes and props’ leads to a series of scenes in which two wackily dressed characters say wacky things to one another. Story and character development are not priorities, and the result is a succession of dialogue scenes with even more absurdist characters and surreal stereotyping than the improv-usual.

The players also struggle in the face of some pretty aggressive accompaniment from the two musicians. There were several scenes where the sound overpowered the dialogue, and it felt as if the music was fighting the players, trying to push the scene in a certain direction and leaving no space for quieter moments. I often could not hear what was being said, and wondered if those on stage could hear each other.

Towards the end of the show members of the audience are invited onstage to dress a player as a character that they’d like to see in a scene: a good gambit, and one that I think would have been better placed at the top, as it allows for interaction and investment from us, and also makes us semi-responsible for the scenes that result.

There are some nice lines and some successful moments – a flirtation on the tennis courts, a poem about seagulls that sees some pretty inventive prop work – and Hamish Parkinson is a delight to watch. He manages to slow down the action, forcing scenes to have a varied pace, and he does nice work building worlds without words.

The props and costumes used in the show are for sale in the bar after – all proceeds going towards the Opportunity for Animals shop.  A nice touch, and they seemed to do some pretty good business, so as an innovative partnership between second-hand shops and theatre I would say Thriftshop is on the right track.

As a performance though, this was not the best work I’ve seen from any of these players, and it will probably require more experimentation with the structures and boundaries of the format before it can really sing.  

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