BBefore she shot to stardom with This Is Going to Hurt and One Day, Ambika Mod trained with improv group Free Association. She’s rejoining them for three days on the fringes of the festival, in one of two impromptu shows they’re putting on at the festival. 3 is a long-form format in which three performers use three words from the audience to construct three connected scenes. Tonight, Spies, Breakfast and Chicken spark what I can only just describe as a story involving parents in a playground, a kinky one-night stand with musical accompaniment and a failed plan to save an egg from a greedy chicken dealer.

FA are currently prominent players in the booming UK improv scene, and 3 is entertaining from start to finish. Two of FA’s core members, Naomi Petersen and Graham Dickson, star here, risking upstaging Mod in the opening scene. She falls back on the role of a character who doesn’t speak, while Petersen and Dickson alternate between flirting and scheming, appearing as two spies disguised as a mother and father standing at a playground gate. This imbalance mostly resolves itself, but – although she’s clearly a good improviser – Mod performs in a calmer tone and tempo than her co-stars, more on the up and up, steamrolling her narrative ideas once or twice.

Not with great profit: While it’s delightful to watch the story sew itself together, in this performance it results in a rather threadbare frock. But if the narrative satisfaction is only partial, the comic pleasure is plentiful as the trio produces from nowhere a child who can’t stop biting dogs, a barbershop quartet who offer sexual services on the side, and a lascivious poultry baron (“when I get horny, I just squirt out of my mouth”). The trio ends up tangled in knots as they try to figure out who’s who, who’s a spy, and who’s on whose side. But as they first get tangled and then try to untangle the tangles, it’s great fun to watch three performers with drive and no small amount of skill—today’s special guest is, of course, along for the ride.