Preview: The Cambridge Impronauts bring Quickfire: Head2Head to the Cambridge Fringe Comedy Festival

The Impronauts are Cambridge’s oldest improv troupe, and they’re set to return with a bang at the beginning of Easter Term with their new show, Quickfire: Head2Head, following the success of their last piece, Lent Term’s Keeping Up With The Kimprov.

The troupe will be performing the show on Saturday 23rd of April at the Blue Moon Pub as part of this year’s instalment of the Cambridge Fringe Comedy Show, and I spoke to the creator and host of the show, Barney, to find out more about the show itself and the team behind it.

For those who are entirely unfamiliar with the Impronauts, they are a troupe of comedians who specialise in improv – “Improv being comedy where we don’t come in with any kind of script or plan or preparation other than a vague idea of the structure of what’s going to happen, and we let the audience provide us with the ideas, where we might be, who we might be as characters, and things that might appear in our performance, and we then perform it completely off-the-cuff.

A snapshot from rehearsals. Image credits: Kristina Shaw

“We, The Impronauts, do two different types of improv, the shorter versions where you play lots of different games and the audience gives lots of prompts, and longer form where you take an hour and create a longer narrative, getting ideas from the audience at the beginning and then creating character arcs, plotlines, twists, and more – we do it all. We have shows regularly at the ADC, including on Sunday nights where we perform our shorter pieces, and the the late shows, where at 11pm once a term or so we perform a longer show, the latest of those being a parody we did of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.”

He adds that The Impronauts have really helped him “to discover improv”, as he joined the troupe officially in 2019, becoming Troupe Director by early 2020 – only for things to be moved online fairly rapidly due to the pandemic. “But now we’re back!”

And back they certainly are, for their recent shows have been categoric successes, with the aforementioned Keeping Up With The Kimprov attaining a 4/5 rating from TCS, and their Michaelmas show Comic Sans: The Return of the Serif landing a 5 star review from me here at The Tab back in November.

Image credits: Barney Jeff Slater

Head2Head was Barney’s own idea – “I have a knack for coming up with ideas and realising they’re already things – I remember when I was a kid I wrote out an entire idea for a novel, gave it to my sister, who took one look at it and asked me, ‘Have you seen The Truman Show?’ – I hadn’t, and it turns out I’d written The Truman Show but worse… And this turns out to be another one of those.

“Head2Head is a short form piece, where we get lots of people to improvise on stage, and they do little scenes and little games for the audience, very highly interactive, the audience will be providing prompts every 5 or 10 minutes, but in this case, there will be two different teams of improvisors, who will be competing against each other – so, who’s fastest to guess who this person is secretly being on a blind date, who was the funniest when given an object, who can make the other team laugh?

“And [making the other team laugh] is always a difficult thing with improvisors, because we’re all somewhere between completely stoic or corpsing all over the place. […] It turns out this concept is already a thing, called theatre sports – I didn’t come up with that! – but we’re doing that, which should make for a fun semi-competitive environment, because there’ll be plenty of silly games and the audience will have a pretty strong influence on who wins at the end.”

Image credits: Barney Jeff Slater

I was curious to find out what rehearsals are looking like for this show so far. “For this one, it’s really just a case of playing lots of games, so that the improvisors are prepared for everything. There’s also an element of rapport, we have a pretty big group which is made up of a pretty diverse group of people, so we want to make sure that everybody is on the same page, not only in terms of chemistry – which is super important in improv, you need to be able to bounce of each other – but also to make sure that what we say is fun and not upsetting at all.

“The thing with improv is that, because literally anything can happen, you’ve got to be very careful about what you say – we’re an inclusive group, so there’s all sorts of things to cover in rehearsals to make sure that everybody is comfortable, as well as building a rapport and making sure everybody knows what the games are going to be on the night.”

He adds that everybody performing is “incredibly talented, so people should come along to see them, because they deserve it!”

Quickfire: Head2Head will be performed at the Blue Moon Pub on Saturday 23rd April, 18:00 – 18:50. It is free to watch but troupe ask that you book tickets in advance here, and there will be a bucket collection to help keep the troupe going. 

Feature image credits: Barney Jeff Slater