It's a tricky thing comedy and improvisation has to be one of the toughest genres.

There are no scripts to rely on. Instead, actors make up scenes on the spot based on scenarios suggested by the audience.

The danger would be having a show where none of the jokes are timed properly, or there simply are no jokes because nobody has time to think of anything funny.

Luckily, The Mayday Players hit the spot more often than they missed it and their show was performed with enough of a sense of fun that occasional mishaps were forgiven.

It was all part of the fun and compere John Cremer encouraged the audience to groan when a scene or a joke didn't quite work.

The show followed a similar format to Channel 4's long-running early-Nineties programme Whose Line Is It Anyway?, with a series of "games" which were played out using suggestions from the audience.

The audience participation element led to a series of side-splitting scenes at the Players show.

In one skit, all five actors played characters at a dodgy bodypiercing studio, all suffering pre-menstrual tension. They then played out the same scene with Welsh accents, then with all five actors playing Nelson Mandela.

Another game saw the actors playing villagers whose interconnecting lives meshed in more and more bizarre and confusing ways, into a sort of domesticated Pulp Fiction set in rural Britain, with opticians and people stuck in phone kiosks instead of gangsters.

The Mayday Players offered a highly entertaining night out. The show was funny, spontaneous and the actors had diverse and interesting characters which bled into their performances, ensuring the show kept going off in more and more wacky tangents.

The Marlborough Theatre was sold out. In a show of hands, about half the audience said they had been before, showing there is demand for this sort of a night out.