The Dome at BATS Theatre is dimly lit with dark blue stage lights and large glow sticks. A woman with auburn hair and bright 90s-style eyeshadow greets me with a conspiratorial smile and slips a scrunched-up ball of red paper into my hand. This is for voting, I am told. The audience fills up and eventually the woman known as Ginge (Nina Hogg) runs out of voting papers to hand out, and instead joins her counterpart Minge (Megan Connolly) in dancing around the stage.

Bedecked in Split Enz-esque power-shoulder suits and jerkily doing ‘The Elaine’ dance from Seinfeld, they seem to be in their own world. For a moment I am transported to university days, Saturday nights in someone’s flat, cheap alcohol and cramped living rooms filled to the rafters with people I like.

And that’s what the show feels like. A party with sixty-five-ish of your closest friends, if your friends happen to be cool, funny and quite a bit mad.

The lights go down then up, explosion sound effects fill the room, the audience hollers in response, and Ginge and Minge run onstage, doing their best to make an absolute racket. As an established sketch-improv duo, their chemistry is immediately evident. They finish each other’s sentences, tag onto each other’s jokes, and banter at a rapid-fire pace as they explain the game of the show to us.

For every brilliant sketch that makes it onstage, there are countless terrible ideas that were binned. But do they all deserve to be? Hogg and Connolly have gathered some comedian friends who are desperately seeking redemption for a darling they don’t have the heart to kill.

Who will bring these to life? Waltzing out on stage, making intense eye contact with the audience, come tonight’s Vessels of Comedy: Ralph Hilaga, Austin Harrison, Lesa MacLeod-Whiting and Lia Kelly.

The Redeemables tonight are sitting amongst the audience! (gasp!) They could be any one of us! The first one, it turns out, is Liz Butler. Butler tearfully recounts the time a loved one told her that her talking horse detective idea was too “high concept”. She turns her baseball cap backwards and pounds an energy drink. Game on.

What transpires next can only be described as skilful chaos. Haze fills the stage. Musician Criss Grueber sets the tone with a film noir soundtrack. The horse detective solves murders while speaking a transatlantic accent. His bottom is detachable. The widowed femme fatale trots onstage with a whinny. No, wait, that’s not Butler’s vision. The femme fatale is a beautiful human woman, obviously. There is a dressage scandal, and in the end, the horse is a serial killer – and that’s why he is such a great detective?

The audience is still reeling from this surprise turn of events when it’s time to vote. Those who didn’t like the scene lob their paper balls into Ginge’s basket while she runs around the stage. If only voting was always this fun. Butler is redeemed via vote, cue another teary speech before Redeemable number 2, Elliot Lam is brought on stage, and so the chaos continues.

Lam’s idea is Ex-factor, and the audience is a polyamorous polycule looking for their 63rd, who will woo them with musical talent. Redeemable number 3 is Anita Perkins, who brings us a plagiarised short story from her childhood involving talking animals. Are they redeemed or redumbed? It doesn’t seem to matter; each of their directed scenes has the audience in stitches, their ideas are wild and their banter is sharp. The excitement in the air is palpable as red balled-up paper is lobbed across the theatre floor. Everyone is having a ball.

Somewhere between watching MacLeod-Whiting chassé (jauntily, as directed) across the stage while reciting Italian poetry, and marvelling at Kelly perfectly finger-syncing to Grueber’s virtuosic improvised tune, I snap out of the trance long enough to realise we’ve all been tricked. This is no ordinary flat party, this is a tour through Willy and Wonka’s factory. The Redeemables and the Vessels of Comedy are the marvellous sweets presented to us, as if to say “look at our talented friends, aren’t they incredible?”

And yes, I would agree as I leave the theatre, breathless from an hour of laughter. Yes, they are.

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