Review of 'LIGHTS! CAMERA! IMPROVISE!'
by Martin Belk for The One Magazine

It was with a curious eye I sat, awaiting the fate of the improvisation gods, as the lights grew dark over the sold-out Scat Pack audience. To my relief and utter delight, what emerged was an intelligent, talented, trained and practised group of actors who brought to life comedic theatre as it should be. With little to work with but a plot dictated by the audience (which included a horror theme set in a bakery in Glasgow and a tap dancing fairy) they brought to life a hilarious play that had every audience member, aged 6 to 60, engaged, involved and bursting with glee. What separates this from inane slapstick, panto, or low-brow potty humor is the skill - this is no simple feat. Serious facilitated theatre dates all the way back to the Greek chorus, and requires a keen awareness on all sides to take this biggest risk on stage - lose the audience for even a second and you might as well give up. But the ScatPack has no worries, they delivered, hands down, receiving the first enthusiastic standing ovation I've ever witnessed in Scotland.

So while 'art is now all sight and sound' and the 'books' may be 'shut' as Gore Vidal recently observed, stories and storytelling are very much alive as long as The ScatPack are thankfully prowling. This show beats the pants off all the lesser, thinly-contrived fare. The key ingredient: it was clear that these guys and gals absolutely love what they're doing. They even stand outside afterward and thank you for coming. Imagine that... And the Scat Pack gets something else right: they don't look down at their audience, they look into it. Nice one.

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