SHOWSTOPPER!'s Double Agent On Improvisation And The West End

Oliver Senton

?I've been a double agent for nearly ten years now. Some of my time is spent with the words of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Chekhov or Ravenhill, telling extraordinary tales that play out repeatedly each night, a few of them even with songs. The rest of the time I'm in a tightrope-walking team. We step out over empty space at the start of each performance, with only each other, faith, and a few meagre skills to stop us from landing flat on our faces. That's Showstopper!

Doing the show in the West End is like bringing the hemispheres of my brain together, or a new girlfriend to meet your family; because improvisation is still regarded by many in our profession as an embarrassing relation to scripted stuff; a scruffy, rough-and-ready, quite frankly inferior, cousin. That's how it is with new things of course; it takes time for attitudes to change. But of course impro isn't new - Second City reached New York from Chicago in the Fifties, Theatremachine started a few years later over here, the fabulous Comedy Store Players have just celebrated thirty years of extemporised antics.

But putting an improvised show on Shaftesbury Avenue is saying, in effect: this is as good as all the other West End fare, just as deserving of your hard-earned cash. So it's all the more encouraging that the reception has been overwhelmingly positive from press and audiences alike. A whole new crowd is behaving as our audiences have been behaving for years - they whoop and holler, they rise to their feet at the end, and they come back for five, six, sometimes ten shows. Last night I met a group of three young women at stage door, all of them nannies, who have clocked up eighteen trips to Showstopper! between them and have no intention of stopping there.

A very well-known and respected Canadian improviser travelled from Austria (where he lives) just to see the show. It was very clear to him that we are, as he put it, 'legitimising' the form, as others have done before us. Legitimising the form. Because it is a form as well as a skill. Like dance. Ballet, tap and hip-hop are all dance. Austentatious, Lights! Camera! Improvise!, The Comedy Store Players, us, they're all improvisation. And many, many shows besides, all over the country.

It's harder to see outside the community of improvisation, but there's been an explosion in the form in Britain in the last ten years. When I'm teaching impro many students, many people still think of Whose Line Is It Anyway? as being what impro is. That's all most people know. And Whose Line is amazing, it's a benchmark, still running on Dave, still funny and genuinely improvised. But things are moving on. Narrative or 'long form' impro has reached us, telling longer stories, like 'proper' plays; they've been doing it in North America and Australia for years. And now we're making it our own here. So finally the scruffy cousin gets to sit in the same spotlight. And the lobes of my brain can join up again.

Oliver is appearing in Showstopper! at the Apollo Theatre, West End until Nov 28, and then '59 Minutes To Save Christmas' at Sheffield Crucible in December. Series 2 of Trodd en Bratt say 'Well Done You' will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 from November 29.?

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