From Gray’s Anatomy to House MD, medical dramas, particularly American ones, remain incredibly popular. So it makes sense that improv theatre company The Free Association would set their new Edinburgh Fringe show, St Doctor’s Hospital in this context.
If you’ve ever seen a fully improvised comedy before then you’ll recognise the set up here. Our host, Alison Thea-Skot, first chats with the audience, settling on a young lady who has come to her first ever improv show. She’s an internal comms manager at a retirement home and has just got a new puppy. The cast take all this information and construct an entirely unique episode around it.
So we end up with this wild and wacky Benjamin Button type story that also involves a doctor that treats his colleagues and patients like canines. Also, for reasons unknown, the role of an internal comms manager was translated to being a spy in this story.
Of course, this isn’t the show you will see, as is always the case with improv it’s an entirely different show each and every time. That also means it can be a bit of a hit or a miss in terms of how the show turns out, and for this episode of St Doctors Hospital it was veering more towards the miss.
In attempting to fit in all of the audience member’s references the story became quite convoluted, and the cast, although all incredibly talented seemed to be struggling to bring it all together. Working as a team is key to good improv and there seemed to be a definite disconnect between a couple of the performers.
However, they did manage to pull some kind of story together, and that’s not easy, no matter what initial prompts you start with. It was also very funny in the most part, and would have been even funnier if the story hadn’t gotten quite so out of control.
As well as a different show each day St Doctor’s Hospital also has a rotating cast (there’s nothing to indicate who you’re watching other than the host who introduces themselves) so it’s not possible to call out here the strongest performers today, but they were the doctor with the fear of old people, and the misguided fellow who kept taking patients to the vet.
St Doctor’s Hospital has a strong premise, and although the diagnosis will be different every day, you’re more or less guaranteed to be prescribed a healthy dose of laughter.
