Austen powers

Forget Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Jane Austen's "lost" works—like Northanger Rabbi, Pride and Predator and Man-Filled Park—are being lovingly resurrected by improv group The Milk Monitors, who return to the Free Fringe this month with their 2012 hit, Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel.

Anyone who saw the show last year won't need reminding of the huge queues that snaked their venue, The Counting House, sometimes for hours before its start. "Fights nearly broke out," say the still slightly-shocked group of six, speaking the day before their first Edinburgh show this year.

It's easy to see why: Austentatious is a dazzling combination of long-form improvised comedy and real literary sensibility complete with a live cello player, sending up the world of Austen without belittling it. Since its lauded Edinburgh debut and slew of four and five-star ratings, the group have been nominated for a Chortle Award for Best Character/Sketch Act and appeared on Radio 4 Extra. Recently, a descendant of Jane Austen's brother even came to see the show.

The conceit is simple: audience members are invited to make up a title for a "lost" Austen novel and drop their suggestion in a hat. An Austen scholar (played by one of the cast) then reads out some of the works of the day, and the third suggestion picked will be improvised as a "forgotten" Austen story over the subsequent hour.

"It's often something that sounds like a Jane Austen novel but isn't," says Cariad Lloyd, a former Comedy Award Best Newcomer-nominee who's also performing in improv show Cariad & Paul: A Two-Player Adventure this year. "So we've had Mansfield Jurassic Park, Darcy and Bingley Forbidden Love, We Need to Talk About Darcy, 50 Shades of Mr Darcy…"

"The general trend is things about Darcy that are vaguely lascivious," adds Joseph Morpurgo, who's performing his debut solo hour, Truthmouth, at The Counting House on the Free Fringe too. "But occasionally, we get curveball titles that have sod all to do with Austen."

"Hamlet was weird," agrees Lloyd, "and The Lady Boys of Bangkok." Graham Dickson—also appearing in Fringe play Below The Belt with fellow comedians Mike Wozniak and Tom Golding—has his own favourite: "It was at a crappy Slug and Lettuce gig very early on. Someone had scrawled in pink lip gloss, Bus Wankers."

In their first Edinburgh show of 2013, they perform the gloriously surreal suggestion Chess, Chaffinches and Cheese Sandwiches, which riffs on Austen-esque themes of love and money to create a story that really does feel like a complete comic novel. Their second performance takes on the even more bizarre title: Fishy Milk. "In a way," says Morpurgo,"it's also a way of reclaiming elements of Jane Austen's work that are popular but aren't quite correct – for instance, that it's very straight-laced. If you read her work, obviously it's really funny. But her Juvenilia is borderline zany. Her letters too speak to this mind that would probably enjoy our show more than you might initially think.

"I think our show is inventive and often quite strange. It's nice that people come in maybe not being au fait with what we do as improvisers, then leave having got the bug for the form."

It's the form that keeps Austentatious fresh. "When we surprise each other, that's always fun," says Rachel Parris, also performing her debut solo show, The Commission, at The Counting House. "In one show that sticks out for me, Cariad [Lloyd] was playing a beloved maid. About five minutes from the end, she revealed she was my mother and we thought my mother had been dead throughout the whole show."

"When something comes out of your mouth that you didn't know was in your head, that's very satisfying," says Andrew Hunter Murray. "It's a result of being on stage with people that you trust."

And they're never tempted to duplicate structures that have worked well in the past. "Once a show's done it's done," says Amy Cooke-Hodgson. "There are some golden moments I remember but I certainly wouldn't think about replicating them because I just don't have the memory bank to do that."

Austentatious' success certainly seems to be part of the current resurgence of improv in the UK. "It feels like the tide is totally turning," says Lloyd. "When I first came to Edinburgh, there were three improv shows. This year, there are 64."

The show's rapid success has also been part of the evolving attitudes to the Free Fringe. "It's just another option now, rather than a lesser option," she adds. "I really like that people who can't afford to see you are able to come. You want an audience more than you want to make money – that's what's important, having an audience."

And it's the audience that's ultimately behind their best-loved lost Austen titles. "One of my favourite shows is one from last year called Sly's New Car," says Lloyd. "We all thought that's so weird, what does that even mean? It just turned into one of our best shows."

Other classic submissions include Sixth Sense and Sensibility, Lost in Austin Texas, Stone Cold Steve Austin and Gilded Bussom Hall ("I think they tried to spell bosom," says Dickson, "but spelled it 'bussom' instead.")

"Consider this a clarion call to the audiences of Edinburgh to give us increasingly freaky titles," Morpurgo challenges. "Do your worst, you freaks!"