Adam Meggido - Improv Beyond Rules: A Practical Guide to Narrative Improvisation

IMPROV

BEYOND

RULES

A Practical Guide to

Narrative Improvisation

Adam Meggido

Foreword by Mischief Theatre

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

To all my students

thanks for the education

The most vulgar ruffians and mountebanks get it into their heads that they can draw crowds and entertain them with words, and like so many bumptious Hercules in golden chains they try to perform improvised plays in public squares, mangling the soggetti, speaking off the point, gesturing like lunatics and, whats worse, indulging in a thousand scurrilities and obscenities, in order to extract a sordid income from the purses of the spectators.

From Dellarte rappresentativa, premeditate ed allimprovviso (The Art of Staging Plays, Premeditated and Improvised), A Treatise on Acting from Memory and by Improvisation by Andrea Perrucci, the Neapolitan, 1699

Foreword

Henry Lewis, Artistic Director, Mischief Theatre

Dont make rules, make principles, Adam always told us in his improv classes. Its a fantastic ethos not just for improvisation but for theatre-makers and storytellers of all kinds. Rules box you in; principles free you and, in my opinion, its impossible to create anything thats really original unless you look beyond the rules.

I first met Adam Meggido, the extremely wise writer of this insightful book, back in 2008. It was my first day on the One-Year Foundation Course at LAMDA (London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art). Adam was the head of the course and took our improvisation classes; classes which immediately became my favourite part of the excellent theatrical training LAMDA has to offer. My twenty-nine classmates and I sat on the scuffed, beige dance matting at the beginning of an awesome journey.

Adam isnt just an excellent improviser, hes also an excellent teacher of improvisation. Many people who are truly brilliant in their field lack the skill of being able to pass on their genius, and of course there are many great teachers who communicate theory very well, but Adam is a rare combination of both. In his classes, as he does in this book, he transforms the seemingly impossible into something exceptionally practical with his trademark patience, charm and clarity and from the first session our year group fell in love. How wonderful it felt to be able to walk into class at 10 in the morning and leave an hour-and-a-half later having created two-dozen characters, ten new scenes, five songs and a love story, all while laughing more than we ever had in our lives. In the all-consuming drama-school bio-dome of Shakespearian text, emotional memory and Alexander Technique, improv was an oasis of fun and play it has informed my career in huge ways. Mischief Theatre may well have never existed without it.

A few weeks into our training, Adam announced that he and his improv gang were presenting a show at The Wheatsheaf, a pub in Fitzrovia. It was an improvised musical he said, with live music and off-the-cuff songs. We all bought tickets immediately and we had the time of our lives watching Only the Dead Can Dance. The audience loved every minute, seeing ideas they had just invented off the top of their heads being transformed into live songs and action just moments later. It was hysterically funny, electrically exciting, and as live as live can be. This early iteration of course went on to become Showstopper! The Improvised Musical, Adams brainchild, and probably the most successful live improv show in the world today.

My theatre company, Mischief, began as an improv troupe while we were still training at LAMDA. Thirteen of the twenty-nine of us who sat on the scuffed, beige dance matting took an improvised show up to the Edinburgh Fringe the very next summer. We were green and the show was rough and ready to say the least. I remember one slightly unfortunate promo performance for a small family audience where an upbeat, ukulele song about a monkey on a bus took an unintended dark turn

Monkey on a bus!

Monkey on a bus!

Dont know what the fuss is,

Dont know what the fuss is,

Now the policemans ended all the monkeys fun with a gun,

The monkeys dead.

The family whose four-year-old daughter had suggested Monkey on a Bus as a song title immediately walked out. We managed to keep the other four or five families in the room until Bert the Bus Conductor was asked what he kept in his special magic box, to which (under the pressure of performance) he responded, Dead women. The remaining families exited and the gig finished there.

At LAMDA, Adam talked much about learning through failure, and we certainly did that day. But that Edinburgh show of ours was the beginning of a journey that was to change my life completely. Over the following years, Mischief began to grow, members came and went, some stayed on at LAMDA, and some went on to train elsewhere, but we always got together every weekend to work on our improv craft. We began doing shows in London and headed back to Edinburgh every summer.

Mischief now does less performance improv and more scripted comedy, but improv in many ways sits at the heart of everything we do. It was our formative years doing improv that allowed us to discover the comedy dynamics that worked best for us and to develop a group chemistry. All our new scripts are workshopped before going into production and through improv a huge amount of new material is discovered. Thanks to our improv work we learned the principles of storytelling that we use in our writing to this day.

In 2017, we presented Mischief Movie Night in the West End, a reworking of our early film-themed improv show Lights! Camera! Improvise! We asked Adam to come on board as improvisation consultant; wed worked with him on other projects since LAMDA but it was wonderful to look at improv with him again. He had a wealth of new exercises and a slightly different but finely honed approach to the subject, which he fully explores in this book. An approach that focuses less on the dos and donts and more on developing practical skills in areas of performance that improvisers need. Looking at status, storytelling and scene work, letting the improv take care of itself. Its a practical guide that strips away the cult-like mystique that improv is often shrouded in and provides an accessible handbook that anyone can learn from.

Adam has taken improv further forward than anyone else in the UK. In the book Adam quotes his mentor Ken Campbell as saying, Theres no point improvising unless its better than scripted stuff! Adams winning of the 2016 Olivier Award in a category consisting otherwise entirely of scripted work is surely a lasting testament to the fact that he and the Showstoppers have achieved this.

Mischief Theatre was founded in 2008 by a group of graduates from the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art. The companys scripted and improvised comedy has been performed in the West End, across the UK, on Broadway and on all continents barring Antarctica! Notable productions include The Play That Goes Wrong (Best New Comedy, Olivier Awards 2015), The Comedy About A Bank Robbery and Peter Pan Goes Wrong. From Autumn 2019 the company had a residency in the West End at the Vaudeville Theatre featuring Groan Ups and Magic Goes Wrong, created with Penn & Teller. Their first full-length TV series, The Goes Wrong Show, was broadcast from Christmas 2019. Mischief Theatre is led by Artistic Director Henry Lewis and Company Director Jonathan Sayer.

Preface

This book will help you to improvise narrative drama and comedy in a group on stage. If you are new to this subject, it will guide you through the principles and techniques from scratch. For those with more experience it provides an opportunity to re-examine how improvisation is studied and practised, addressing a number of misunderstandings and confusions, while broadening the approach to, and awareness of, the subject in general. It is also aimed at groups working with or without guidance, and teachers for classes of all ages and levels of experience.