Gig review by Steve Bennett at the Vaults Festival, London

Happily Never After promises long-form improv with a Tim Burtonesque slant, all based on a solitary suggestion from the audience, based on the occupation of one of their grandparents.

'Watch-maker' was the calling chosen by Brighton’s long-established Maydays troupe tonight – a job perfect as a basis for melodramatic gothic drama. Perfect, too, for metaphors about the group working like clockwork, each part working in synchronicity with the rest.

That’s certainly true of the tight musical pieces, delivered with a skilful choreography, especially since it was all done on the fly. However, for what was billed as a musical, the show contained only a couple of numbers – Showstoppers! it ain’t. However there was an amusing ditty about self-esteem, and an atmospheric musical bed throughout.

The loosely entangled plotlines the troupe chose yielded mixed results. First, the brooding horologist and his child-hating wife generated an enjoyable tension, with the idea of him creating a clockwork baby certainly worthy of Burton.

An inventor creating a time vortex was a little more straightforward sci-fi silliness, though it gave Rhiannon Vivian a chance to show off a comic turn as a despotic, brattish ten-year-old, and the boring people condemned to the whirlpool are a dependable comedy trope. In this strand, they made good use of a slip-up, making it a running joke.

They got into a bit more of a cul-de-sac with Heather Urquart’s main character, however, with one ad-lib saddling the troupe with the single joke that her whole office job was to constantly check the time and tell everyone else, which struggled to develop.

It was one aspect which meant The Maydays weren’t able to solidify their ideas into one slick story, like the very best of the genre, their rough edges a constant reminder this is improv. And it meant the conclusion was abrupt, not natural. 

And while there were a reasonable smattering of laughs from bona fide funny lines, the show relies more for its amusement on a sense of strangeness and the occasional struggles of its talented cast with their ad-hoc logic.

• The Maydays: Happy Never After runs at the Vaults Festival beneath London’s Waterloo station until Sunday at 9.15pm daily.

Review date: 2 Feb 2017
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett