A completely improvised 50-hour comedy soap opera is happening at an Islington theatre across the weekend.
Starting 7pm and running until Sunday at 9pm at The Pleasance Theatre, the aptly named London 50-hour Improvathon is set to delight watchers.
This year’s theme is ‘Welcome to Pleasanceville’ and has been described as ‘The Goonies meets Twin Peaks meets Stranger Things’.
Pulling off an event this scale requires many people, with Dylan Emery, producer and company member, telling the NW Londoner nearly a 100 people are involved in keeping the weekend running smoothly.
“We have an amazing hard-core fan base so there’s always people in the audience,” he added.
“This year many us had watched Stranger Things and we thought it would be so much fun to create our own version of Hawkins.”
The comedy epic, created by Showstopper and Suzanna Rosenthal Productions, is split into 25 two-hour shows, and guests are brought in from all over the world – some for even just a few hours at a time to perform here.
This unique experience of performing on and off for 50 hours is obviously a challenge. However Emery notes that once people are on stage, the adrenaline kicks in and self-censorship is suppressed which creates exciting, emotional and hilarious scenes.
Intriguingly, his secret recipe for staying up through the night is self described as ‘boring and sensible’ and simply involves drinking water, grazing on food, stretching and soaking up the sun when it comes up.
Additionally, the performance raises money for charities each year, with money being raised for SignHealth who provide support within British Sign Language and The Multibank who distribute surplus goods to families in poverty whilst reducing waste this time around.
Click here to donate and here to get your tickets.
Featured image credit: Andrew Pugsley
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