Theatre

We all know you can improvise jokes. If I had a biscuit for every time someone asked me, ‘So is your show like “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”,’ I’d be twice the size of Mike McShane by now. But my company, Cartoon de Salvo, wanted to do something different: to improvise entire plays.

We went to San Francisco last summer, the capital of so-called ‘long-form improv’, and learnt how to improvise, not sketches and gags (that’s ‘short-form’), but whole stories – dramas, tragedies, comedies, romances. It was an eye-opening week. We’d been searching for years, in shows like ‘Meat and Two Veg’ and ‘The Sunflower Plot’, for a way to unite the giddy delight of impro with the satisfaction of a really good story – and now we’d found it.

The result is ‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’, which opens in London this week after a national tour. Three of us perform (myself, Alex Murdoch and Neil Haigh), and we go onstage without the faintest idea what’s going to happen. Except that we’ll ask the audience for a title. In Bracknell, we were given ‘The Glass Eye’; in Bingham, it was ‘Appalachian Mountain Tragedy’. In Northumberland, a tot in the front row dictated pretty much our whole play by giving us ‘Alien Robots Take Over The World’.
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We then offer the audience a menu of songs. ‘HHH’ was partly inspired by the music of some loveable old folkies called the Refried Ginger Jug Band. We fell for their parping, banjo-driven sound, applied it to some of our favourite songs and used it in our show. As it happens, I am the company’s chief cider-jug trumper, which involves making farting noises into ceramic vessels until I go dizzy. ‘You will hyperventilate,’ the Ginger Jug Band warned us. But in San Francisco, we were told, ‘Remember to breathe. Oxygen is a great friend of the improviser.’ Hmm. I’m not sure we really thought this one through.

So the audience select some song titles, and we promise to weave them into the story. That, to universal relief, is the end of the audience participation. And that’s the extent of the ‘structure’. The rest is in the lap of the impro gods. Is that scary? Not necessarily – after all, there are no lines to forget or entrances to miss. Yes, we might crash and burn sometimes. But audiences love impro’s perpetual flirtation with failure. It seems only to heighten that wild atmosphere we experience nightly, the exhilaration of punters and performers careering off on an adventure together, mainlining the adrenaline of not knowing where on Earth (or elsewhere) it’s going to lead.

When it works, it combines the pleasure of a ripping yarn with the thrill of a down-to-the-wire sports event or a tightrope walk. All we have to do is relax, embrace what the subconscious throws up, and trust in our story instincts. After all, stories have been hardwired into all of our heads – and hearts – since infancy. So when we’re improvising a play, what should happen next will come naturally – if we let it. When we start a play called ‘The Riding Weekend’ with a scene about an amnesiac in a wheelchair, it’s highly likely we’ll later find that he lost his memory in some equine accident. Mind you, impro – because it has no author, none of us censor it, and because it’s often triggered by happy mistakes – generates stranger material than anything we’d write. A landscape gardener who has to Riverdance his way out of Hell? Check. An unhappy camper kidnapped, forced into an old woman’s wedding dress and made to marry a 14-year-old werewolf? Yup, that one’s in the bag too.

But the craziest story of all is that impro is so marginalised in the UK. Since its presiding genius Keith Johnstone left the Royal Court in the 1960s, to become a king-over-the-water in Canada, British theatre and impro are the twain which seldom meet – nowhere near the mainstream, at any rate. Exceptions include Ken Campbell, say, and the great Improbable Theatre, who have argued that British theatre has too many vested interests, and is too in thrall to its literary heritage, to admit that plays might be dramatic, tender or profound – as well as funny – even when they’re made up on the hoof.

But I say, why leave this joyful, radical activity, the only artform whose audience is present at the moment of discovery, to joke-tellers? Comedy’s great, but it’s hardly scratching impro’s surface. To the question ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’, maybe it’s time more actors, directors and dramatists answered: frankly, it’s mine.

‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’ is at the Lyric Hammersmith Studio from May 15.