I'm going, dear girl, with the army

Assessment of how last night's show went depends very much on who you talk to. Ask Andrew Pontzen about it and he will begin quietly weeping into his sleeve. I, on the other hand, take the positive view that it had a good plot (dissatisfied housewife leaves home, joins widow's army, kills French people, returns home satisfied), and some moments of real drama. (It was an unusually serious show by recent standards - not that this is a problem, thus is the nature of narrative improv.) And nothing can be all bad when it ends with the exchange:

"Promise you'll never leave me again, darling."
"Can I still shoot people?"
"Every once in a while, dear."

What it did lack was pace and energy, so it was perhaps natural to come out of it feeling a little dissatisfied. Such is improv, but it poses the problem of how to deal with a show that is not as good as it could have been.

My solution has been to craft finger puppets of each of us by cutting up one of our flyers, enabling us to re-enact parts of the show that went wrong from the comfort of our own flat. If you have one of our flyers you can try it yourself - you will find that the Jameses come out with most limbs intact, but due to their positions on the flyer Andrew P comes out with a disturbing (though not unentertaining) snake-like body, and Andrew O has very few body parts to speak of at all. I actually felt it necessary to create a body for Andrew O out of other flyers, so my puppet version now looks like he's a midget about to embark on a season at Brighton Pier in the 1930s.

Who knows, perhaps one day we will all wake up looking like our puppet counterparts. It would certainly make for an interesting show. On the other hand, it would make flyering extremely difficult.