SADOMUSICAL @ The Actors Theatre

Let's get one thing straight, although in Brighton, very little is. Sadomusical is the kind of show that grabs you, ties you down, and absolutely refuses to let you leave without a grin stapled to your face. From Similar River part of the award-winning team behind CSI: Crime Scene Improvisation, Lee Apsey and Jayda Fogel arrive at The Actors Theatre armed with electric shock prods, mousetraps, bamboo canes, elastic bands, and reckless creative ambition that ought to come with a safe word.

The premise is simple, deranged, and, once you've submitted to it, completely irresistible. Two virtuoso musical improvisers take turns inflicting genuinely real punishment on each other while the other attempts to remain funny, melodically coherent, and artistically alive. They alternate between torturer and artist with the practiced ease of people who have clearly given this dynamic a great deal of thought, and possibly a great deal of practice. The suffering is not simulated. The songs that emerge from it, remarkably, are funny.

Pain, it turns out, is merely the raw material, what Sadomusical manufactures, in quantities that catch you entirely off guard, is joy. This is a show that beats you about the head with its own generosity, dunks you in its warmth, and zaps you repeatedly with something that feels like euphoria. If that's wrong. none of us want to be right.

Apsey and Fogel are a gloriously well-matched pair, complementary, combative, and clearly bound together by something deeper than mere professional respect. Their improvisational chemistry has the quality of a relationship that has been thoroughly road-tested: elastic enough to stretch to snapping point, yet always springing back into shape. They are, in the very best sense, each other's willing victims. Supporting them throughout with understated brilliance are their musicians, a keyboard player of quietly devastating precision, and a trumpet and percussion player, together forming a musical backbone that holds its shape even as everything around it is being electrocuted.

The songs themselves are the show's most impressive pleasure. Forged under conditions that would break most performers, mid-shock, mid-wince, mid-bamboo-caning, they are genuinely good. Funny, sharp, occasionally tender. Brighton queer culture has always known how to make something luminous inside constriction, how to find the pleasure folded inside the pain. Sadomusical lives it, loudly and joyfully, for sixty magnificent minutes.

Audience participation delivers its own exquisite torments. The room, gasping, cackling, wincing in collective sympathy, joining in with the abandon of people who came for a Saturday night fringe show is itself part of the instrument. One hapless straight couple, had their nascent romance reconstructed live on stage before them. Invited to contribute by enthusiastically whacking pool noodles on the performers, they wilted under the pressure. Bless them. Apsey and Fogel, to their immense credit, extracted comedy from the ruins with the practised ease of people who have absolutely been in tighter spots, and have the marks to prove it.

There is something about Sadomusical that feels, at its irreverent, anarchic heart, deeply queer. Not in its content, the kink is gestured at rather than belaboured, but in its sensibility: the radical generosity of making yourself genuinely vulnerable in front of strangers, the refusal to separate pleasure from difficulty, the insistence that the most honest art is made not in spite of pain but sometimes, gloriously, because of it.

Take someone you adore. Prepare to be bound, beaten and thoroughly delighted.

Sadomusical till May 24th @ The Actors Theatre, Brighton Fringe. Age 18+. Tickets from £7.

Content warnings: audience interaction, strong language, loud noises, and a distressing number of mousetraps.