Saturday was the last of my performances as part of Hoopla’s rolling House Team programme, in which they stick together a bunch of promising improvisers (and, on this occasion, me), try out some new formats, and see what comes of it all.
I wasn’t able to make all the sessions, which consisted a couple of hours’ coaching with Hoopla impresario Steve Roe followed by a performance at Hoopla’s Improv Pre-Party on a Saturday evening. But the ones I was able to attend – like this one, which I wrote up here – have been extremely rewarding and useful, and I thank Steve for his excellent teaching and my fellow improvisers for being both very generous performers and very lovely people.
A few new actual improv teams have developed out of these sessions, including The Krayzies, an improvised gangster show, and Not Suitable For Beebies, in which a bunch of wide-eyed Kids TV presenters do PG versions of films and telly shows. [1]
For Saturday’s final session, we focused on the basics, and I had what felt like another eureka moment. As Steve explains it, what people remember from improv is the relationships, not the jokes. In our games and short scenes, we focused on establishing the relationship between the characters on stage as quickly as possible. As with sketch, this can lead to some slightly clunky on-stage sentences, but it works: while it might be clear to the people on stage that they’re brothers who don’t get along, because the elder brother was explicitly their parents’ favourite (I pick this scenario at random), it might not be clear to the people watching. And so:
“Dad always treated you so much better than me, Brian. You were the brother who was going to make the family proud, while he didn’t even care that I couldn’t tie my shoelaces”.
Anything in the scene from here is thus grounded by a relationship: an older sibling with the silver spoon, and the younger one with a bee in their bonnet about perceived or actual unfairness.
You can see this being escalated already: “You were fed raw steaks, while I had to subsist on gruel.” “You slept in a bed, I had to share the cat’s basket”. Wherever these people go from here, the audience is happy to follow them as soon as the core relationship is established.
We divided into two groups for the evening’s performance, picking from some of our favourite formats from the House Team season. One group was to do the aforementioned gangster show; the other plumped for “Meanwhile”, featuring lots of very quick edits without necessarily requiring a narrative.
I enjoyed this format a lot. Last time out I reflected that while I was pretty good being on stage, I needed to be a better team member while on the wings. Improv relies on quick edits – no improviser ever said “dang, I wish you’d left us hanging a little while longer”. Some improvisers – myself amongst them – worry that they’re being rude by interrupting a scene, but the truth is quite the opposite. Some improvisers – myself among them – worry that they should have a clear idea of what they’re gonna do next before they interrupt and start another scene. I am fighting both of these anxieties with the purifying fire of repeated practice and being 87% braver when on stage.
As always with improv, if I said what happened in the actual show, it would sound complete nonsense to anyone who wasn’t in the room, and as always with me, I am going to tell you anyway. We called our team “Relationships Relationships Relationships”, as a reminder to… focus on relationships. And it went well: after a riotous game where one acts out a previous scene based upon the summary of an audience member (I got to lick a pizza in a chain restaurant and have a shit date – win!), we headed on to our main bit, the aforementioned “meanwhile”.
Our “meanwhile” was set in a financially struggling Disneyland, in which I played Mr Disney, a man always desperate for cost-cutting measures enjoying an exciting new pitch: allowing the customers to operate the rides and perform as the characters themselves, thus significantly cutting down on overheads.
After the show, I hung out with my fellow improv lads and chatted to them and their friends, family, and lovers who had come down to see them perform.
I think – hope – I’ve made at least one or two firm friends from this experience, and after a few years feeling like a bit of a sore thumb at improv shows, I now feel part of the gang and not just a weirdo hanger-on. This goes against my natural disinclination to enjoy cliques, so I’m sure I’ll still lurk, weirdly, on the edges of the improv world. But for now, I’ve definitely drunk the Kool Aid – I’m back on stage in one day’s time.
[1] I’m in the latter group – while we’re still working out exactly how the thing works, it definitely has potential. I got to call someone a “Mother Fudger”, for example. You can’t ask for more than that on an evening out.
jamesofwalsh 
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