Brian Logan’s claim that improvisation is “finally catching on in Britain” seems to step over a rather substantial history of companies and performers using the form in this country.
At the very least, any company working with forum or playback theatre forms is heavily dependent on the skills and conventions of improvisation. I’m thinking here of companies like Playback Theatre York who’ve been active since the early 90s and Cardboard Citizens who have been using Boal’s forum form to explore homelessness for a similar amount of time.
While there has been a cult of celebrity built around the solo artist (as actor, director or playwright), that cult has not stopped other kinds of work from being popular and successful – even within a London-centric hierarchy that has oftentimes tended to look down on community and theatre-in-education work.
I do agree, though, that improvisation is often treated as “the runt in the theatre litter,” “bracketed with comedy or ghettoised as glib tomfoolery.” Leaving aside the implicit ordering of art that puts good comedy below “proper” theatre, part of the problem is that some reviewers have no idea how to deal with improvisation as a performance form.
It’s really not so many years since The Stage accused Keith Johnstone’s group of faking it – performing scripted work as though it were spontaneous. The patterns of invention and reincorporation onstage weren’t just unfamiliar, but seemingly impossible.
As Logan suggests, that kind of confusion persists due to narrow expectations about what constitutes theatre:
The main problem is that theatre in the UK is still seen as chiefly a literary art form – but improvised plays emerge as if by magic, without any author.
It’s perhaps not that improvisation isn’t popular or hasn’t existed, but that it hasn’t always been recognised when it’s actually taking place.
I also think that the link to Who’s Line Is It Anway has been propagated by lazy reviewers and lazier companies with little regard for how live theatrical improvisation relates (or rather doesn’t relate) to carefully edited televised improvisation. It might be an easy point of reference for audiences, but it’s shorthand that hinders rather than helps. It’s a sales-pitch, and that’s the limit of its usefulness.
You’ll also forgive me for getting all high-priest-of-the-art for a moment to conclude, but knowledge of rehearsal improvisation exercises does not equip anyone for live performance based in improvisation; similarly, the tools amd skills used to devise work using improvisation are not identical to those in improvisation as performance form in its own right.
Yes, they’re strongly related, but one doesn’t guarantee knowledge or ability in the other. In other words, crappy improvisation (like any other kind of crappy performance) results from a lack of respect for the form as a discipline which involves specific skills and effort.
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