Mystery Movie Night, review: could you invent a cheesier Hollywood film than this?
Mischief Theatre are the young(ish) upstarts responsible for the …Goes Wrong brand of mishap-beset buffoonery. A year ago, it looked like things could only go right for this talented West End-conquering contingent: their long-running The Play That Goes Wrong and The Comedy About a Bank Robbery appeared unassailable, while their new hit Magic Goes Wrong seemed set to run and run as well. Oh, and the BBC had commissioned a second batch of their instantly popular spin-off series, The Goes Wrong Show.
Though they cheered us up at Christmas with the standalone episode, The Nativity, on BBC One, they’re in the same wretched boat as the rest of Theatreland, waiting for the green light to get back to business. Refusing, however, to sit idly by while Covid continues to wipe the smiles off our faces, they’re going back to their roots as an improv troupe and delivering – for a short spell, at £10 a go – a streaming version of the improvised “movie night” with which they briefly tickled punters before things went awry in mid-December.
The premise is simple, and similar to the kind of challenge that would be put to participants of Whose Line is It Anyway? back in the day. Our host – Jonathan Sayer’s insistently chirpy-to-camera “Oscar” – says he’s presiding over an “infinite” DVD collection of films to watch. He just needs a few steers from viewers to decide the genre, location, title and a few elements to spice things up. That input is facilitated by him choosing suggestions from an interactive gallery of folk at home, using Zoom; voting for a given option is done by a show of “waving hands”.
What did the dozen or so Mischief-makers – performing in surprising proximity in a makeshift studio – get given on the first night? A 1980s musical film (Careless Whisper) set in a library. Although the reigning champions of the off-the-cuff musical are Showstopper! – who happen to be online, just once, this week too – the result displayed winning levels of lightning-fast inspiration coupled with the perspiration that arises from the threat of the collective inventive effort drying up or running awry.
Sayer acts, cannily, as the controller, pressing pause to interject disbelief at particularly ludicrous turns of events or request a new ingredient. It’s very much a “you had to be there” experience, but for what it’s worth, my teenage son, marvelling at the neat opening number of chorused “sshs” and Disneyfied emoting – “Open up the book, open up your heart”; “This is the page for the age!” – was near-convinced that the cast must be getting help through earpieces.
The narrative structure involved dramatic conflict of the most jerry-built (but thereby quite Hollywood) sort: a library threatened with closure by a vixenish mayor who thinks “Books smell like old pages!” and champions computers. But the juvenile fun of spontaneous make-believe elicited a compulsion to learn more of the cobbled-together back-story of sibling rivalry, to savour the comic incidentals and directives, and to relish the fittingly schmaltzy denouement: “Technology and literature can live side-by-side!”
Every night will be different, some more miss than hit, but that essential satisfaction – of seeing a dash of coherence wrested from potential spiralling chaos – feels thoroughly therapeutic right now.
Nightly until Sunday, then a one-off performance on February 14; info: mischiefcomedy.com. Showstopper! streams on Saturday at 7.30pm; info: showstopperthemusical.com
