On Sunday night, the WhatsApp group for the improv troupe I’ve been in for over four years received a message from one of our members. We’d been discussing our potential availability for a date in November where we were being asked to perform for the first time in over a year, and one of the group had yet to reply. When they did, it turned out that the delay had been due to some “serious thinking over the last few days” and the conclusion “now is a good time for me to take a step back“.
The only thing that shocked me, was how not shocked I was. Sad, yes, but not shocked. Back in April, I had opened up a Pages file on my own computer and wrote the following to myself:
“Today I am thinking of quitting the improv group I helped found four years ago. I am writing this (improv suicide note?) to put my thoughts together and consider if quitting is the right thing to do.”
I then spent the next few hours writing out my thoughts and feelings about the group, and its place in my life, and tried to figure out if it was a good time for me to take a step back. The upshot for me was, after a lot of soul-searching, and clarifying to myself exactly what had become so dissatisfying about the group (I wrote nearly 4,000 words), that I eventually decided some improv is still better than no improv, even if the improv I was doing was not entirely ticking all my boxes creatively, and so I decided not to quit. To enjoy what was there rather than focus on what wasn’t.
That attitude had been my mantra throughout the group’s life. We formed in 2015 with a simple request as the title of a Facebook message: “more longform please”. A fellow improviser and I had been talking outside a theatre, following performing in a one-off themed long-form show together, about how fun we found long-form compared to short-form improv, and how much we liked the work of the UCB Theatre in New York. She messaged a group of us later and said we should meet up and pursue that idea further. The message was music to my ears. I had returned to improv in 2014, following the death of my mother (immediately after an improv class she taught, as it happens), after a seven year absence. I’d taken some local “intermediate” classes I discovered online, despite my years of experience, to reacquaint myself with the basics and those classes opened up opportunities to meet fellow Birmingham-based improvisers at a weekly “drop-in” the teacher also ran. Those sessions focused on a variety of improv skills, usually to plug back into the short-form show he ran each month, but sometimes, as with the one-off themed long-form show, he would run special seasonal shows which called for something longer. Although the short-form focus was fun, I had always loved the long-form side of the art-form far more and began to attend socials following these drop-in sessions precisely to see who was yearning for something more than games from their improv.
After all, improv really is my first love. Before I was ever given a guitar to play, I was watching Who’s Line Is It Anyway? on TV. Before my best friend and I formed our first band together at school, we were improvising in Mr Brooks’ drama classes and creating our own, improvised, versions of Bottom and Watchdog in between watching Stephen King movies. Some might look at my academic qualifications and see my university career as a journey of philosophical inquiry – from BA, to MA, to PhD. In reality, it was a journey of improvisation: from auditioning for a student show called Theatre Anarchy and not getting in, to watching it from the audience and participating in a fashion segment which required an audience volunteer, to auditioning for and getting into Theatre Anarchy 2 the next year as a cast member, to devising and directing Theatre Anarchy 3 myself, and meeting through it a cast of people I believed would be my close friends for the rest of my life. Those “friends from college” that you always heard adults talking about. We put on a smash show at the Crwys Theatre, we went up to Edinburgh together as part of the Hardcore 24/7 crew in 2004, and after an aborted attempt at writing sketch comedy in Don’t Say Blue Dragon, we returned to what we loved, improv, and formed a group called The Fourth Chair, which ran a successful long-form improv show above a pub in Cardiff until creative differences led to our dissolution (turns out only some were those “friends from college” who remain your friends for life, the others don’t speak to me anymore).
The end of The Fourth Chair had been fairly traumatic, and the cause of my seven year absence from improv. When I decided it was time to dip my toe back in, I was explicit to myself about just trying to enjoy it this time and not seek perfection or complete artistic fulfilment. Which is why, at first, I was content to just enjoy doing short-form, like when I was a kid at school first discovering this wonderful art-form. Even my desire to do long-form was open-minded; see what people were interested in doing and see if anyone wanted to explore the idea with me. No grand plan or specific format ideas. Just see what we could cobble together. Hence I was content, just as a small group began to emerge as possible candidates to explore long-form with, that, at the same time, the organiser of the drop-in put together a long-form Christmas show featuring myself and that group of people. Life just sort of worked out. Rather than having to broach the subject myself, we were doing it anyway. Though far more cautious and structured than I liked, it was a start. I was the new open-minded and easy-going version of me, not looking for anything beyond what there already was. Some improv, being better than no improv. And eventually it led to that conversation outside the theatre anyway, and the message to us all about taking long-form further…so why rock the boat seeking perfection?
Obviously I had preferences and hopes for what this newly forming group might achieve. We had, after all, been inspired by discussions specifically about the UCB style, but I was determined not to let this improv group descend into the acrimony of my last. I wasn’t going to push for anything in particular (besides doing long-form), I would just get involved and offer any expertise or ideas that I had on an equal footing with everyone else. We were all coming to the project with different ideas, different experience and ability levels, different motivations, and different ambitions. We were going to have a clash of styles and philosophies…but those clashes would define what we ended up doing, rather than undo it, I hoped. I’d have a voice, yes, but I wouldn’t let it dominate. We would find where we all came together and go from there.
The open-minded approach seemed to work. Soon we were dabbling in some of my hoped for formats anyway: Harold, Asssscat, La Ronde… We spent time trying to make the most of them with our varied styles and talents and soon we were performing them in public, first at the Freewheelers scratch night at Cherry Reds, and then, following a fateful double-booking, once a month at The Victoria – a room above a pub in the city centre.
To me the space at The Vic was a dream gig. No expectations from the venue and no deal with the bar – just a free room and a sound-system for us to do whatever the fuck we wanted to. I went wild with the marketing – spending lots of money on Facebook ads and making visually exciting posters to mark us out from other improv groups in the city. That was a big thing for me. Every other Birmingham based group at the time was fairly tame. They all had their own spin on what was essentially quite a formal and semi-community theatre aesthetic: happy, positive improv that was silly and fun rather than daring or bold. I wanted us to be different. Frankly, I wanted us to be punk rock. I wanted to make the room above the pub a scene people wanted to attend. I wanted to appeal to the punters already in there, and those looking for intelligent and alternative comedy in Birmingham. Improv, to me, is all about intelligence. To be able to make up an entire long-form play on the spot from a few audience suggestions is an intellectual exercise. There are so many plates to be spun, connections to be made, ideas to be played with all at once. You have to be unabashedly smart and ready to use your head to make this impossible madness work. I put together a theme tune that was startling and demanded attention; playlists full of heavy guitars and cool music to use as house-sound as people walked in. I wanted us to feel edgy, adult, and fun. Like a best kept secret you stumbled upon in a neighbourhood bar. And I wanted us to stay free; a bizarre and anarchic artistic gift to the city. An inexplicably good free night of entertainment with no strings attached, no collection at the end or “pay what you like” (though they could buy a t-shirt if they wanted to offer financial support).
However…Birmingham had other plans.
Our first shows at The Vic were well-attended, but back then we still had a first half of longish, but still essentially short-form, games. People were guaranteed laughs in that first half and were then far more forgiving for our long-form experiments in the second half. As we began to settle on long-form formats and fill both halves of our show with long-form though, after a few months the audiences started to dwindle.
The dwindling coincided with an internal discussion we were having within the group about the role of comedy in our shows. Was our intention to be “funny” or was our intention to be “good”? Could a long-form improv show also be a serious drama? Could we make an audience cry as much as make them laugh?
My feelings were that I had no problem going to dark and serious places and doing the odd bit of dramatic stuff where it was appropriate, but I have always felt improv is best suited for comedy because funny is funny whether written or made up on the spot – you know whether it works or it doesn’t because people are laughing then and there, in the moment. And comedy is something that often is spontaneous anyway – a polished standup performing their written set may well say something “off the cuff” which gets as big a reaction as any of their pre-written material; a friend down the pub speaks off the top of their head and has her whole table in stitches. There is no impossible feat to pull off in the prospect of making something up on the spot which is funny. Drama, however, is very different. It is so much more about craft; about thought and process. Could I improvise a heartfelt and emotionally rich scene about a couple deciding to abort an unwanted pregnancy? Of course I could…but should I? Wouldn’t it likely be richer, more meaningful, and less potentially problematic or upsetting if I had taken the time to really think the issue through and put those thoughts into writing, using only the best possible words to express the difficult ideas I am trying to get across?
So for me, improv is improv comedy, and laughs should be a core component of what you are going for. And like any comedy that doesn’t have to mean pandering to an audience and going for cheap laughs, but it does mean consciously making a decision to try and make the audience laugh. Thinking about that audience and fulfilling a tacit contract you have with them to give them an enjoyable evening of comedy.
Not all of the group agreed. We took the word “comedy” out of promotional materials for the show. Pretty soon after, we lost a member – a stand-up comic in his day job – and the scenes we performed began to get flabby with hand-wringing attempts at going for drama in places instead of comedy and with our being consciously unconcerned with fulfilling audience expectations. The spaces between laughs in our shows grew longer, the laughs became less consistent, no longer being everyone’s goal, and the audiences started to notice. Former regulars stopped regularly attending. Across Birmingham new improv groups appeared, explicitly promising “comedy”. Their audiences flourished as ours trickled away.
For a while we persisted with our strange pull in different directions anyway – comedy, drama, funny, serious – but eventually we settled on a format which we all liked and which allowed us to pull in those different directions without pulling the whole show apart: a first act montage of random scenes we called “Scenes of Consciousness”, designed to give us the freedom to play to all of our different strengths and interests with no specific through-line or agenda. Then we’d get the audience to vote for their favourite character out of the first half, and explore their world a bit more in the second with a La Ronde (a series of two-person scenes which go in a circle until the last character meets the first). Although the format was solid, the audiences had already started to falter, and we remained inconsistent in what we were trying to achieve which made some bits of the show less successful than others. It would be frustrating to see our post-show notes sessions filled with the same notes each month, or conflicting notes without a clear collective idea of what we were seeking to achieve. But some improv is better than no improv. So we all tried to make it work. Even as we lost another member and were down to just five. Even as we had to change our rehearsal space. Even as other life commitments began to make demands on our time and energy…
There was no denying that, though audiences may have grown tired of us, we all still enjoyed improvising together. Our weekly rehearsals were a highlight of my week, and our monthly shows were like a religion to me. I had a whole little ritual attached, starting the night before when I would come up with that month’s show playlist (until my music tastes were vetoed by the rest of the group). On show days I would go straight into Birmingham from work instead of driving home first. I’d change at school, drive into the city centre, and sit at the Starbucks on Colmore Row getting caffeinated, reading, writing, and listening to music until about five-thirty. Then I’d walk over to Grand Central and get dinner from Pret-A-Manger there. The sandwich would change, but the “improv juice” never did (their lemon and ginger juice, which I found helped my perpetually sore throat from teaching stand the strain of a show). I would sit there a while, reading some more, and then go over to The Vic and set everything up so we could maximise warm up time when everyone else got there and get ready for the show.
I was never nervous, only excited.
Weirdly, for someone with as much day-to-day anxiety as me, I never felt nervous before an improv show, or when I was on stage improvising.
While shrinking audiences and creative tensions could be annoying, and some days even downright infuriating, they never got in the way of my enjoyment of what we were doing together. It was imperfect, but so is everything. And some improv is better than no improv. And sometimes we were even pretty fucking brilliant! In fact a lot of the time we were. It may not be every second of every show, but every show we did had at least a few great ideas and characters that would keep me chuckling until the next one. And some of our greatest stuff was never even seen by the public, happening instead in one of our living room rehearsals to an audience of only the five of us. Like I said: it was the best part of my week.
By last year things started to change. Too many Vic gigs were in danger of becoming nothing more than a glorified rehearsal as the room remained empty until ten minutes after we were supposed to have started. We were putting on our shows for two people, three if we were lucky, like a depressing Edinburgh run for a newcomer instead of the crowds of an established act. We’d been doing a monthly show on the same night at the same venue for years, and had failed to build an audience. At the same time, the rest of the group began to do other improv things outside of our little group. Some always had, just as I always had my music, but the seriousness of those other projects stepped up, or returned after a lengthy hiatus, pulling four of the five of us into many different improv directions (I was always a one improv-troupe man. The demands of my day job had always meant I only really had one evening a week I could afford to give over to improv, so didn’t spread myself too thin). Suddenly our once a week rehearsals were having to compete with rehearsals for these other things, or even show dates for the other groups some of us were involved in.
The first death-knell happened towards the end of 2018, when once again we found ourselves playing a support slot at the Birmingham Improv Festival. I pointed out that it was a pretty bad sign of our success when after three years of doing this we couldn’t even get a headline spot at a festival organised by a member of our troupe! If even he didn’t have faith in our abilities to draw a crowd or put on a great show, then who would? And what did it say about our own self-perception that some of our own members didn’t feel we were headline-worthy?
The comment was sort of tongue-in-cheek, but also not, and it got us thinking. We decided our Vic show had obviously grown stale and perhaps run its course. We would do the September show there, and then make the festival show in October our last public performance for a while. We’d go on hiatus for a few months – until April, perhaps – and work on a new format. Then we could come back with much fanfare in the new year, with a new format, and relaunch the group and try to win our audience back. We talked about things like being funny and explicitly going for comedy, we talked about what we all wanted to achieve, we talked about where we thought the holes were in our current show and approach, and we talked about the sort of things we could do to make things better on our break.
As much as I hated the idea of giving up the monthly show, I got excited about the possibilities of the hiatus as a time for coming up with something really cool, and was encouraged by our discussions about what we wanted the new show to be. Something unashamedly comedy, something with narrative, and something which still allowed us all to accentuate our various strengths and make up for each other’s collective weaknesses. Stopping the show for a few months would be a necessary evil to get the train back on its tracks and get us moving again in the right direction. So, ultimately, it would be worth it.
Except it didn’t quite happen like that.
We talked a lot about what we wanted to do, and we dabbled with various theories and ideas around narrative. We spoke about narrative structures and we made up many interesting stories. But the format idea to encapsulate all that remained elusive.
Then we hit on one, just as I was beginning to give up hope (the first time I started to question if we were even a serious group anymore) and I was super-excited for it. I remember speaking to my friend on the drive home from that rehearsal session where we came up with the idea. I call him each week as I’m driving home from rehearsals and the week before I had been saying I was thinking about quitting. He could hear the difference in my voice that week as I spoke enthusiastically about what we were doing for the first time in a long time.
But a few weeks later and that format had begun to go on the back burner. The others just weren’t into it as much as I was. At around the same time, a decision was made for our weekly rehearsals to go down to fortnightly rehearsals. That was March 6th, about a month and a half before that April 24th dark night of the soul I had when I seriously considered walking away and, importantly for me, a month before our hiatus had originally supposed to be coming to an end. Far from returning triumphantly to the Vic with a new show in April as I had signed on for, we still didn’t even agree on what the new show would be! And with all the other improv commitments people had, they were in no real rush to get our group back on stage. They all had other places to perform. Indeed, the call for fortnightly rehearsals was due to the others having other improv commitments on the alternate weeks. I objected to it at the time, thinking it was the exact wrong move if we were serious about getting a new format up on its feet, but again – some improv is better than no improv – so eventually I agreed to it as fortnightly was better than nothing.
The problem with fortnightly though, is that if someone misses a week it can be nearly a month before they improvise with us again. And we were always one person shy for a whole range of reasons – illness, other work commitments, holidays booked, etc. Since going fortnightly there was only one rehearsal I remember with all five of us in attendance.
Our last rehearsal was July 17th. I always tend to take the summer off improv because that six week break from work is vital to me as a time of rejuvenation and sanity and the routine of weekly rehearsals feels too much like term-time, as well as undesirably binding me to the area each week instead of allowing the freedom of vacation and travel. However, we usually do fit a rehearsal in somewhere (and used to always have the August show at The Vic to do). This time, with the new fortnightly schedule, it turned out I was genuinely busy, or even out of the country, every second Wednesday. At least one of us was busy every other week were we to swap the fortnights around. On July 17th, three rehearsals into trying out yet another new format (which still hadn’t yet found its voice), we scheduled in our next rehearsal for September 4th, derailing whatever minor progress we’d achieved.
It seemed very clear to me then and there that it would be at least October – a year since our hiatus began – before we had anything new to show anyone, and that it was highly unlikely we would have anything ready by October with only two rehearsals in September to get us there. It also seemed clear that our group was no longer anyone’s priority. The others all had other improv fish to fry, meanwhile I was getting far more fulfilment out of thirty minutes on my bass guitar than I was spending two hours treading water and getting nowhere on a new improv format.
I had already planned to give September 4th a chance (because some improv is better than no improv), but swore to myself that this would be the last one. If things didn’t feel like they were going anywhere after a few weeks, it would be time for me to finally bow out. When the message came on Sunday, quickly followed by another member of the group saying “this raises real questions about whether [we] should carry on or call it a day, now that we’re down to 4″, as well as sadness, I felt relieved. The decision had been made for me. Finally, it was over.
I shall miss our weird and wonderful little group. Our Wednesday explorations of every nook and cranny of our unconscious minds. Our legacy of imperfect but impressive shows. Our four year attempt at doing something different and shaking up the Birmingham improv scene. Our characters both on and off stage.
My experiences in The Fourth Chair, I realise, made me keep my fellow performers somewhat at arm’s length throughout the whole four years, for fear of getting hurt the way I was hurt before when creative disputes became personal ones. I see now that, without our fortnightly obligations, I will likely see very little of these people who were a huge part of my life for so long, and that makes me very sad. While they all became friends and part of each other’s lives, I remained a strange outsider to them all. A colleague. I would like to think they would each still think of me as a friend, but I know I have done very little to socialise or get too close to them outside of our improv-related meetings. It’s amazing how much losing an entire friendship group via email over ten years ago fucked me up. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to properly socialise since? I certainly haven’t made many new friends since that time. Self-protection can be so fucking self-defeating. I hope that despite my crappiness at being anything more than a fellow improviser to them, my former improv mates and I do stay in touch.
And so now it is Tuesday. The dust has settled. Some improv has become no improv at last and my mantra of the last four years has finally been overwhelmed by the facts of reality. Unlike the others in my group, I have no other improv group to fall back on. And I haven’t performed improv in public for nearly a year now. I am freed from the depressing treadmill of a work-in-progress which isn’t progressing, but I am cast out of a creative pursuit which certainly helped me through some of the toughest times of my life. I have my Wednesday evenings back, but what will I use them for? Do I find another improv group to join? Or do I finally say “no” instead of “yes, and…” and block the suggestion of the last four years for something else? Music perhaps? Do I start looking into performing music again? Find an open mic or two? Do I use the time to write the next Strangely Shaped By Fathers album? Do I use it to write more in general? Do I do something completely different? New choice!
I don’t know. All I know is that I am saddened by the loss of my improv group, but excited at the new possibilities it opens up, whatever they may be. It began on Facebook Messenger and ended on WhatsApp. We were The Kneejerks (2015 – 2019), goodnight!
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