‘Shall we give ourselves a night off from being funny?” There are unassuming performance styles, then there’s David Elms. At a festival that teems with ingratiating theatrics, it’s quite the gearshift to watch Elms deliver this hour of improv with no mic, props, a set or anything else prepared. We have to lean in, which is useful for a show that relies on the audience’s suggestions to crank things up.
Some may find David Elms Describes a Room underpowered. But it’s right up the street of those of us who love improv when it’s not beholden to the gag, and given space to breathe. This solo offering, from an act better known as sidekick to Nick (Mr Swallow) Mohammed, is built around an improv exercise in which a performer invites the audience to dream up and describe the room he’s occupying. There’s a stag’s head on the wall, someone proposes. There’s a window overlooking a mountain. With nudges from Elms, and just a little fun backchat, a picture takes shape of every nook and corner of this room – some kind of hunting lodge tonight, with “between five and 18” Russian men in a sauna just beyond the door.
It feels like, and indeed literally is, scene-setting, in anticipation of a scene to come. One soon wonders, such is the detail Elms goes into and his unhurried style, whether any such scene will eventuate – or whether the describing is an end in itself. Were that so, this would remain an unshowy delight of a fringe venture, with Elms the softly spoken foreman of a construction site of the mind, located somewhere between the audience’s ideas and his own.
We do finally see him occupy the space we’ve built, interacting wordlessly with each mimed item, suggesting, with an almost vanishing subtlety, narrative connections between this feature and that. As the audience laughs to see each proposal recalled, it’s an object(less) lesson in the transcendent power of collective imagining, and in how little is needed to bring a story and performance to life. It’s also a lovely, skilful and understated hour of extempore comedy.
