The Bean Spillers – Hen and Chickens Theatre

The Bean Spillers performed at the Hen and Chickens Theatre, London.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

When presenting an improvised musical, the key is to start with a premise that is unusual, vague and preferable hilarious. Gigglemug Theatre’s The Bean Spillers aims for all three by asking the audience to provide the best bit of gossip they know, distilled into a tabloid headline.

For their May performance, the accepted theme was “bride discovers her 30-year-old groom is still breastfed by his mother when she walks in on them during the couple’s honeymoon”. Which is both too long for a tabloid headline and also the premise for a series of sketches on Little Britain; but the source of the original gossip does not matter a jot.

Improvisers Sam Cochrane and Alex Prescot, joined by guest performer Joy Tan, start from this already ludicrous premise and weave a story in which Cochrane’s breast milk-imbibing antihero is revealed to be a bigamist with a secret love child, before the growth spurt induced by continual ingestion causes him to become an Incredible Hulk/King Kong hybrid monster who lays waste to London.

It’s all very, very silly, and tremendous fun. Jordan Clarke’s musical accompaniment helps the songs to stay on track, allowing the three performers to work out verse structure and rhyming schemes on the spot.

Cochrane and Prescot have an easy relationship, and one senses that each always has an inkling for which way the other will take a scene. As their guest, Tan is the wildcard, throwing in elements and plot twists that may not always come off, but which keep proceedings always off-kilter enough to be frequently hilarious.

One gets the sense that the Bean Spillers attempt to resolve each hour-long improv piece with a moral for the audience to take away with them. For this piece, there are several: the main one seems to be that family is everything, even/especially when you’re imprisoned with a harpsichord and lots of free wine. Which is maybe a little too oddly specific for wider application. The true moral, though, is that The Bean Spillers provide an hour of high quality idiocy that is well worth the watch.

Scott Matthewman