3 review – knockabout fun as Ambika Mod rejoins her old improv gang

Before she became a star via This Is Going to Hurt and One Day, Ambika Mod trained with improv company the Free Association. For three days on the fringe, she rejoins them, in one of two off-the-cuff shows they’re performing at the festival. 3 is a long-form(ish) format, in which three performers use three words from the audience to build three connected scenes. Tonight, Spies, Breakfast and Chicken trigger what I can just about call a story involving parents at a play area, a kinky one-night stand with musical accompaniment, and a misbegotten plan to save an egg from a grasping hen dealer.
FA are prominent players in a booming UK improv scene right now, and 3 is enjoyable from start to finish. Two of FA’s core team, Naomi Petersen and Graham Dickson, co-star here, and risk squeezing Mod out in the opening scene. She resorts to playing a character who can’t get a word in edgeways, while Petersen and Dickson variously flirt and scheme as two spies disguised as a mum and dad at a playground gate. That imbalance largely resolves itself, but – while she’s clearly a fine improviser – Mod performs at a lower-key pitch and pace than her co-stars. They’re more on the front foot and, once or twice, they steamroller her narrative ideas.
Not to great profit: delightful though it is to watch the story stitching in action, it results at this performance in a fairly threadbare garment. But if narrative satisfaction is only partial, the comic pleasure is abundant, as the trio spirit out of nowhere a child who can’t stop biting dogs, a barbershop quartet who offer sexual services on the side, and a lascivious poultry baron (“when I get horny, I just sort of cum from my mouth”). At the end, the trio tie themselves in knots trying to resolve who’s who, who’s a spy, and who’s on whose side. But as they first tangle then strive to untangle, it’s great fun watching three performers with gung-ho spirit and no little craft – today’s special guest very much included.