Watching popular British topical panel show Mock the Week, which has an inexplicably large number of episodes available on Netflix — peculiar to me due to the topical, timely nature of it, not because of any particular lack of quality — reminds me somewhat of one of my favourite activities at university: participating in the university Theatre Group.
We did all manner of things as part of the Theatre Group. We put on plays, of which I was in several, including Macbeth (which we rather edgily revamped to make it look like The Matrix, like no-one had ever done that before), Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (which we took to Edinburgh, only to discover that the Edinburgh Fringe audience wasn’t as receptive to tragic Russian love stories as we would have liked) and Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round the Garden from the Norman Conquests cycle (which we also took to Edinburgh and discovered that the Edinburgh Fringe audience was a lot more receptive to Alan Ayckbourn).
I also directed an entertainingly chaotic production of Twelfth Night after my co-director sent me an email one morning informing me that she would be late back to university at the start of the spring term because she’d decided to go skiing, and would I mind awfully directing the show by myself because she didn’t want to? (That production gave me more nosebleeds than I’ve ever had in my life, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of my university career, in a good way.
We also threw great parties, usually (but not always) after a production, and had a regular night out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos. But the thing that I miss the most, I think — and the thing I’m reminded of when watching shows like Mock the Week and Whose Line is it Anyway? — is the regular improvisation sessions we had just prior to the regular nights out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos.
The improvisation sessions grew out of the warm-up activities that had become a Theatre Group tradition when starting rehearsals. These tended to be simple but fun activities that could double as drinking games in a pinch, but were often also designed to get our minds warmed up as well as our bodies and voices, and so quite often incorporated improvisation of various types.
Theatrical improvisation games are a lot of fun if you let yourself get drawn into the experience. This is something I always enjoyed about acting ever since secondary school Drama lessons: getting swept up in a role and feeling like you really were, just for a moment, someone else. And in improvisation you’re not confined by a script: you can take things to some very strange places indeed.
In fact, these improvisations eventually grew into a semi-regular improvisation-based show that the Theatre Group put on called Count Rompula’s Showcase. When you showed up to a Count Rompula’s, you never quite knew what you were going to get. On one particularly memorable occasion, the audience was subjected to The Web of Dan, a rather avant-garde piece that the eponymous Dan and some of his friends had joked about in rehearsals for other shows. I wasn’t directly involved with this eventual production, though I was at least present for the genesis of the idea in the rehearsals.
I miss those days a great deal. I’m occasionally reminded of them when we play Final Fantasy XIV, usually on patch day, and devolve into a series of cringeworthy puns based on the environment and enemies we’re fighting in a new dungeon. (The introduction of the icy dungeon Snowcloak was particularly good for this, as you can imagine.) But nothing will quite match the magic of those days when we sat in a circle, miming the action the previous person had said while saying a completely different action we wanted the next person to perform. Or performing scenes based on silly props. Or, indeed, playing Deutsche Erotika, which sadly is not quite as entertaining as its name might suggest.
