Saturday 27th July 2024

I’m planning the next batch of improv workshops, which I’ll be running in the early part of August at The Brunswick in Hove. There are more workshops confirmed for later in the year, but I’m giving myself a few more gaps to catch my breath (although, hey - if you offer me an exciting enough gig with an exciting enough pay cheque, I’m probably not gonna say no).?

I’ve been chatting to a few people about what their opinion of improvisation is, and it’s been instructive to hear just what they think. Obviously, a good deal of people in the UK are vaguely under the impression that improv begins and ends with Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and at the very least, that it’s all about being funny and clever. And crucially: being funny and clever, on the spot, with no preparation whatsoever.?

(I remember being slightly disquieted when a stand-up I know spotted me with a book - the excellent Improv Handbook - and finding it genuinely hilarious. In fact, he found it so amusing he had to take a photo of it so that he could mock it on his socials. It took me a couple of days to even comprehend what he was finding so comical - the very idea of a handbook to help you make things up out of nothing: he thought (and I’d forgotten that people believed this) that improv was something you could do with absolutely no preparation.??

That’s not entirely true (and it’s not entirely wrong, either - the nuance deserves more space than I’m going to give in this blog post), but the idea always manages to pull me up short: when you’re fully involved - and fairly skilled -? in a skill,? you can somewhat take for granted, and assume entirely, that everybody else knows the same things that you do. I’ve sometimes held off saying possibly helpful things when someone else might be struggling because I’d assumed that the thing I know is obvious, and that my saying anything would be condescending.?

But we’re all late to the party, we’re not born with a Manual Of Everything in our hands, and sometimes hearing the obvious is exactly what we need to hear. And it occurs to me that there might be many people who perhaps only did improv once or twice in a GCSE class, or saw a late show at a fringe festival, that might have a somewhat narrow view of what exactly improv is (it doesn’t always have to have a young lad slamming the stage with an open palm shouting ‘SCENE!’ as soon as one of his fellow castmates have delivered a dick joke).?

And improv certainly doesn’t require you to be effortlessly brilliant, all the time, conjuring up Wildean jokes off the cuff. Many actors I’ve spoken to have talked about their fear of working without a script - of needing a script, that they can’t operate without it. But of course, in most cases, actors are indeed working without a script by the time they get to the first night of a run. A script is not the final product, in the same way that an architect's blueprint is not the completed building.?

I sincerely believe that improvisation - even if you never actually improvise onstage in front of an audience in an actual improv show - will make you a better actor, in the rehearsals where you’re working off a script, with other actors who are also working off the same script. It’s not that you’ll be unpredictable and unfocused: more, it will make your relationship with the text more immediate, believable and true.?

If you’d like to a book a space for one or both of the improv classes I’ll be running in August, have a look at this link here.?

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