At CHRONES., we live to discover those pushing the boundaries of digital and interactive performance worldwide. During our visit to Adelaide Fringe, we encountered one of the most unpredictable, hilarious, and genuinely innovative shows we’ve seen on stage: KARATE MAN by the Australian sketch comedy collective BEAK!

Built like a playable video game and performed as a live choose-your-own-adventure, KARATE MAN blends physical comedy, nostalgic storytelling, and real-time audience interaction using game controllers, spontaneous improv, and absurdist punchlines. To top it off, KARATE MAN was awarded ‘BEST IN INTERACTIVE’ at Adelaide Fringe 2025 — an amazing achievement, considering the festival hosts over 1300 shows!

In this CHRONversations, we speak with Bruno Dubosarsky, BEAK’s Producer and Co-Creator, to explore the power of interactive comedy, co-creation with the audience, and how video game logic reshapes live performance. Enjoy the interview!

Let’s start with the usual game of our CHRONversations! Imagine being the protagonist of an RPG, fully customisable by name, appearance, objectives, attitude and special abilities. Can you tell us more about you and the BEAK team through these doubles of yours?

This makes me want to write up character sheets for the entire crew! For me, Bruno, I’m going with a little scamp-type character with a snout-like nose. Low charisma but makes up for it with average intelligence. Has access to a grappling hook and a desire to one day learn how to use it. Enemies find him disarming and ideally end up joining his party. Can jump super high.

As for the rest of BEAK… quite a few bards in there. Each member has their own niche special skill that proves essential to the success of our party.

You call KARATE MAN the world’s first playable comedy show. How did the idea come to life?

The idea began as a 5-minute sketch in our 2022 Edinburgh Fringe show, Cocktail Boys. We developed a basic controller system: a Bluetooth video game controller connected to a laptop running soundboard software. Each button press triggered a sound cue, like the A button prompting “JUMP”, and I would respond to each sound live on stage. This was complemented by a linear cue system that managed music and branching narrative paths.

Initially, we used this to gauge what resonated with audiences: emergent, clown-like entertainment that is audience-driven. Encouraged by the response, we expanded the concept, drawing from our team’s love of video games and interactive theatre.

It took us a while to commit to the development of a full-length show for Sydney Fringe 2023. After months of ideation, we crammed writing, technical design, rehearsing and prop building into one month of late nights. It was a beast of a development process, but our opening night earned us a ‘Best in Comedy’ nomination! This told us we had something special here.

Audience input is essential to KARATE MAN. What have been the most surprising moments you’ve witnessed live?

One of the most surprising discoveries was how some audiences find their own game within the show. A scene that might normally take 4 minutes can balloon to 10 because they decide to stick with one mechanic, like making me just do burpees for no reason, and just want to see how far they can push it. That kind of organic play shaped how we design the show. We’ve learned to build in flexibility and ways to compress or accelerate scenes depending on how the room’s feeling.

We’ve also had moments of total chaos: the audience pressing LEFT so many times I had to run off stage and out of the venue. My favourite might be during a serious phone call between Karate Man and his wife — she’s breaking some devastating, emotional news, and the audience just hits “THROW”, launching the phone across the stage.

During our last video call, Bruno told me (talking about enjoying interactive shows), “It’s like going back to playing with your siblings”, and I found this image extremely eloquent and vivid. What role does nostalgia play in the tone, music, and aesthetic of your show?

Nostalgia plays a strong role. The aesthetic is steeped in 80s and 90s fighting and action games, which we played as pre-nostalgic kids in the early 2000s. To further evoke nostalgia and emotion in our audience, our composer Liam Scarratt took a page from the music design of Undertale. The heavy use of leitmotifs, combined with a blend of organic instrumentation and 8-bit chiptune music, contributes to this effect.

The tone and writing of the show draw from RPGs and adventure games of our youth, like Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon. Despite some adult language and themes, much of the show’s humour derives from absurdity and our embracing of a childish wit.

Do you see this model, interactive narrative + live theatre + technology, as a future direction for comedy and live performance?

Absolutely. I often joke that live theatre will have a resurgence in this brave new world of generative AI, where attending in person will be the only way to confirm something is real (only half-joking…). The variety in live theatre is so important, and the ephemerality of interactive shows — the fact that it can never happen the same way twice — is deeply appealing.

In Sydney, live comedy is still predominantly stand-up, but sketch and clown are on the rise, with more spaces and audiences opening up to experimentation. Stand-up’s great—but there’s innovative work happening in the alternative comedy scene that’s starting to get some recognition.

We always like to greet our guests with the same question! If you could collaborate with another artist (living or not) in the field of interactive art, who would it be and why? What would you create together?

This isn’t really in the world of live theatre, but Toby Fox is just someone I admire so much. I might be too intimidated to actually collaborate—I might just let him do his thing, and I’ll just focus on throwing him thumbs ups. His work influenced us and Karate Man in so many ways, with its branching paths, character-driven writing, choices and music. Maybe Deltarune: Chapter 6 can be live-action? Hit us up.

Images: 1. Photos from Lily Craig and design by Audrey Clark and Bruno Dubosarsky 2. Photo from Alex Gabbott