Review: Tales from the Wasteland @ Acta Community Theatre

From gin-flavoured Baileys to disco ball overlords, Tales from the Wasteland and their warm up show, What’s Your Star Sign, showed with flying colours that you don’t need a sold out show to discover the best events in Bristol.

On Friday night 10th October, the Acta Community Theatre showcased its first improv performance: Tales from the Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic adventure comedy inspired by similar media like the Fallout games and TV show. Preceded by the warm act (but by no means a lesser act!), What’s Your Star Sign?, the cast of mutants, wastelanders and bunker survivors set out on an absurd improvised journey based off the written prompt of an audience member which they had pulled from Morty’s empty skull - a cast member who purported died only 47 minutes before the show was set to begin. Surrounded by gas canisters, skeletons and decrepit signs, the cast go all out on the nights prompt - ballroom dancing.

When I was asked to review the show, my ignorance of improv was certainly showing. I arrived at doors open, two hours before any improv was due to start. Well then, all the better to investigate the Acta Community Theatre and its Wellbeing Café, that serves light snacks, fizzy drinks and a selection of alcoholic beverages. Their café and waiting room space had great community vibe with prints all around of a diversity of other shows and projects and a nearby Bark Park for dogs.

Props on stage, Tales from the Wasteland @ Acta Community Theatre | Megan Oberholzer

Waiting for me there was the infamous Morty with a stack of cards asking, “If the world was ending, what would the one thing you’d want to survive?” In the spirit comedy, not one early arrival took this too seriously. Responses ranged from Bisto gravy granules to His Majesty's Revenue and Customs.

The show began at 8pm, with a fantastic first performance. Unlike Tales from the Wasteland, What’s Your Star Sign? uses live prompts from volunteers who give their name and star sign. Tonight, it was Leslie, who is a Taurus. Using today's horoscope from the local paper, four cast members constructed a story about gin-flavoured baileys, five simultaneous jobs including a church bell ringer, cleaner, bar man, and children’s science education, with hilarious Londis loan sharks, laugh-ripping Pope side quests and an unhinged We the Curious director, from “what first feels unsettling could turn into an exciting opportunity.”

'The show always starts slow with a dangerous dance with cringe, but if you bare with, the pay offs are incredible'

And for me this idea captures improv perfectly. The show always starts slow with a dangerous dance with cringe, but if you bare with, the pay offs are incredible. Improv shows tend to build from basic story strands and events that steadily layer and begin to play off one another until they wind into a crescendo of hilarity.

And Tales from the Wasteland does this expertly. Even with 5 of the normal 9 cast members being ill, away on family business or trapped in Barcelona, the elastic nature of their improv allowed for a great show. I was sceptical about ballroom dancing, and it was clear the cast had just as limited knowledge about it as me. But from tentative, mean-girls tap dance practice scenes and obscure shoe making blacksmiths came an uncontested world of disco ball overlords, (intentionally) terrible tongue-in-cheek landmine puns (”Re-mine-d me, ha ha”), and a fantastic climax with an EastEnders-style family-ties plot twist ending in two spectacular character deaths that left me in stitches (”Screw you and your kitten heels!”). Maybe tap dancing isn’t the best choice of dance genre for crossing a ballroom covered in landmines after all…

Although Friday night was a smaller showing than usual, I had a fantastic time getting to know cast members and some of their friendly and welcoming patrons and friends at intermission, with a spontaneous sense of community.