Telling spooky short stories is a fine art;  figuring out how to create tale that is both to the point and also disturbing requires quite a bit of practice as it’s easy to either fall into cliché or simply make the entire thing a bit confusing.  After Dusk: The Improvised Twilight Zone makes a fair attempt at turning audience suggestions into haunting fun, and just about succeeds.

The show opens with the improv troop, Real Positive Poles, attempting a version of the iconic Twilight Zone introduction, but in a royalty free sort of way.  Sadly because the venue itself is a small hotel conference area, the team struggled to stage this with the right amount of pathos. Audience suggestions are a key part of the act and alas, without the right sort of atmosphere,  there wasn’t really the sort of feedback the actors needed.

Still, we got two fairly well done stories that in both cases struggled to find the balance between genuinely weird and actually funny. At key points the narrative really did shine, they were sparks of absolutely perfect improv, but these quickly became stilted as the stories themselves just went on a little bit too long.

What’s clear is that Real Positive Poles themselves had a lot of fun on stage, and normally this is a good thing. However they also are a little keen and the result is too many element getting added to the story at the start and then rushes to resolve at the end, meaning that both story and the humour where uneven.

The show’s musical accompaniment is via violin and this was very, very good, constantly adapting the background music to suit the scene, no mean feat as the whole thing shifted very rapidly.  After Dusk: The Improvised Twilight Zone is an admirable attempt at creating this sort of a anthology sci-fi horror comedy, but suffered from too much to do in too little time.