Wednesday 15th May 3013

Riiiight. It’s that point of the fringe. That bit when I’m very aware that I’m pretty much sleep walking, I haven’t eaten a decent hot meal in days, and I haven’t properly seen the inside of my flat more longer than eight minutes at a time, tops, either side of what we might generously call ‘sleep’. It’s my own fault, of course. I bring it on myself. And I’ve only got one project going on at the moment. The original plan, you might remember, was to have four different things going on at the same time. That’s FOUR. For various reasons, three of those have been pushed back. No, forward. Hang on, surely it’s forward? You go forward in time, don’t you? So if you delay something, it can only happen further away in the future. But bringing stuff forward means doing it sooner? Whatever, you know what I mean. 

All three of the other projects were bumped due that old friend ‘circumstances beyond our control’. In other words, not down to me. If I had a say, I, uh, very likely wouldn’t have said anything, and I’d still be working on four different productions while juggling a full time job, weekends of running workshops, while committing to a full blown Crunchie and Crusha milkshake habit. I’m barely awake and coherent as it is with just the one project, I’d hate to see how I’d be (not) coping if everything had gone to plan. 

It’s all gravy, though: Beginning Muddle End is going well, while still terrifying. Tickets are beginning to sell even though there’s still a couple of weeks to go to the off. This is the first time that Brighton Fringe has done the full four weeks of May, and that will doubtless have some kind of effect of ticket sales as we hit week 4 (the week that we go up in). As yet, that effect is unpredictable – audiences might be exhausted and penniless, but equally, there’s always a significant number of audiences that circle the fringe for a week or so before finally leaping in and making their choices. Anyway, the link on the NVT website is here: 

https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/search/searchEventDetails.asp?sid=&returnPage=promoter&event_id=35283

Last night’s rehearsal was lovely. I find (for me personally, at least) that a great deal of improv is learning, and then re-learning, the same thing over and over again. The same motif, but re-applied with all the other knowledge you’ve picked up inbetween. As a loose and easy-to-argue contentious point, I’d argue that most short form improv exercises are essentially the same rules, the same game, just with different bodywork. A Mini Metro and a Jaguar are undoubtedly very different experiences to drive, but essentially the same rules apply equally when you’re behind the wheel of either. In improv, no matter how scary or unfamiliar the new game or technique appears to you, if you follow the same basic rules you picked up in improv nursery: Listen, Say Yes, Commit, then it’s almost impossible to go wrong. 

Almost. 

Because even those simple rules can get a bit fuzzy. Recently in Sunday night workshops, I’ve attempted to shave it down to a simple instruction – Be Generous – but even that doesn’t really work if you haven’t already put a few miles on the improv clock. Let’s face it, if everyone on stage is busy being oh-so-generous, then not a great deal else happens on stage.  So it is required that on occasion, you have to put in a hell of a lot of effort into remembering what the apparently simple instructions actually mean. It’s very likely that at your first improv class, you were told to ‘listen’. And, sure, you get that. Everybody gets that. Listening is good, listening is important. And once you get told to listen for the third, tenth, and 100^th time, you know the score, you understand: yeah, yeah, listen. By that time, of course, you only hear the instruction, you don’t interact and engage with it: ironically, you’ve stopped listening. 

With that in mind, last night’s rehearsal was mostly about re-setting some simple map markers. Being told to drive is no good to anyone if you haven’t already taken a bucket load of lessons, the tests, swerved to avoid that damn chicken and hit a few geese (uh, maybe not that last one). But once you’ve put in all that spadework, then you can go forward with just that one word: drive – and all the hard work is wrapped up within that neat little package. And so it is that with the collected tools and proud battle scars of more than a few weeks of improv bootcamp under their belts that the Beginning Muddle End cast can set out into a rehearsal with what are actually complicated notes pared down to simple, single words. Words like Why, Now, How and Shh. All of which are surprisingly complicated concepts that deserve a weekend workshop of their own. 

I’ve been very aware in recent weeks that as long as you’re simply listening and responding (this links in with Shh) that the story will very much look after itself, and by proxy, you and the audience. All you need to do is respond honestly (this links in with the Why). I was considering making the qualification that clearly it’s different for prose – books, novels and the like – because those things generally have to be planned to within an inch of their lives. But that’s not precisely true. I mean, it’s true that a good novel these days probably spent some of its life (half an afternoon, at least) as a half-assed spreadsheet, but that doesn’t mean that the story itself isn’t simply responding to the very simple needs of its own narrative. If you just listen and respond, you can end up telling a story that is seemingly complicated and dense. Take the seven volume Harry Potter saga, for instance. There’s lots of stuff going on there: vast empires fall, kids go through puberty. And pretty much everything in between, including Helena Bonham Carter doing Goth-babe. No, wait, that was just the movies. Where was I? Anyway. The point is – spoiler alert – that not a great deal of complicated stuff happens in the books. The way JK Rowling delivers it is complex, sure, but that’s only because the characters have no idea what’s going on, shrouded as they are in smoke and mirrors. But the central spine of the story is: terrorist fails to assassinate possibly important kid who is saved first by his mother’s love, and then by the love of some guy who pointlessly loved kid’s mum. And that’s it. That, alone, is the story. The plot – horcruxes and suchlike, is only just so much sprinkle. And, in fact, all the sprinkle – the awful Dursleys, Hermione’s cleverness, the blinkered Ministry Of Magic – only exist as a honest and vital reaction to further the meat of the central story, or as a piece of misdirection so that you don’t notice significant plot points being seeded in the first three books. The last two books are largely about resolving everything that’s already been set up: while there are surprises and new information in book seven, it’s all been there since the first novel. Again, for something that seems so twisty turny, everything in those thousands of pages is vital, honest, elegant, and above all, simple. Even the big reveal – the literal reveal – at the end of Wizard Of Oz – tells us that things aren’t nearly as complicated as they might appear. And, if we want to read the film in a particular way, the ending has been set firmly in place before we ever leave Kansas. 

At some point, I’ll talk further about what I actually mean by Why, Now, How and Shh. But, like all the best improv rules (and some particularly nasty quicksands) the rules are constantly shifting. Not changing. But shifting. And who knows what’s buried down here?