Chapter
2
Playing the Game
Improvisation is the primary source
of material for any devising company and an ability to generate material ‘on
your feet’ is necessary. In improvisation, the actors are autonomous,
responsible for their own performances, and free to say or do anything. And
here, perhaps ironically, the director is needed more than ever. The director’s
skill must be in setting up an improvisation successfully in order to achieve
what it needs to. In the case of Spymonkey, working principally through clown
methodology, the improvisations must be structured with clowning in mind, and
the performers must be physically and mentally prepared for clown play.
‘First
of all I play lots of games to make everybody feel silly and a bit useless so
we can start from nothing.’[1]
The ability to feel okay to fail and be laughed at is not something every performer can simply keep once they’ve found their clown, and it must be actively sought at every stage of the process. The games Cal plays at the beginning of a day of work have this aim in mind. Two of these are ‘Mr.Hit’ and ‘King John’. The first is a knockout game which involves participants having to sit out once they’ve lost their lives; i.e. to flop. The second is a game in which, every time you fail, you go the bottom of the pile and the aim is to work your way to the top, to be King. People try to put each other off in their attempts to win, and inevitably, their concentration on blighting someone else leads to their own failure. This natural justice always solicits the loudest laughter. Cal also likes to play simple children’s games like Musical Chairs, to spark the honest sense of fun to play.
‘When you’re interacting with children, everything shows in their face and they don’t pretend and they don’t cover up. They don’t know how to cover up their feelings. And they’re gauche and they’re clumsy and there’s such a beauty in that. And clown is, in a funny sort of way, just recapturing your child.’[2]
The essence of theatre and comedy are here in the game of musical chairs. Participants who’ve been knocked out will always watch and laugh at the remaining players in the game. Their simple desire to be the first to sit in the chair, and the wonderful contrast of sheer joy from the winner and utter disappointment from the one left standing, can be, if they are honestly felt, hilarious to watch.
‘My favourite game to see between actors onstage is friendly competition’[3].
fig.5
Competition permeates almost every scene of Spymonkey’s shows, whether it be the self-contained contest between Aitor and Stephan, in Stiff, to see who’s memorial service is better (fig.5), or Petra, Aitor and Stephan’s constant upstaging of Forbes and each other in both Stiff and Cooped. The seed of this aspect to Spymonkey’s shows can be found in further games, this time improvisation games bridging the gap between the warm up games and the task of creating scenes for a show. The clearest of these in terms of competition is Cal’s own version of the much used, and much varied, Master/Servant format. Cal explains:
‘If you’re the master you’ve
got high status so you’ve got everything to lose. If you’re the servant you’ve
got nothing. You’ve got no status so you’ve got everything to gain. Let’s
imagine it’s actually a show that you’re in and you’re the master and all your
family have come to see the show. And you’re the servant and all your family
have come to see the show and you’re not going to let the master make you look
like you’re low status so you have to try every tactic to make sure that you
make fool out of him, without making yourself a pain in the arse so the
audience are thinking, ‘oh god, look at that poor master who’s got to deal with
that awful person’. So you have to be charming but you have to make sure that
the other person is not higher status than you ... You need to win.’[4]
Our laughter at this game is proof of its inherent theatrical comic potential. What is it, however, that we are interested in and amused by? We are not interested in the complaint Mike has received or the fact that the room was left untidy. We are interested in the way Stephan interrupts his agenda and turns over his attempts to assert his status.
‘Would you rather find another job?’
‘Yes, where?’
Stephan uses various tactics to win the game. His cold turns the attention to himself and presents Mike with the problem that if his ignores the illness of his servant, we may not like him as a master. He asks Mike to repeat something because he is German and needs people to speak more slowly, again a reasonable request forcing Mike into a corner. We know as an audience, however, that these are ploys and we share the joke. The content of the scene is secondary to the game being played, and we laugh at their efforts to win: the harder they try, the more we laugh when they fail, and the better they succeed the more we laugh at the shit they are putting the other one in. If we were to borrow the use of Stanislavsky terms to describe the dynamic of this improvisation, what is interesting is that the objective is played as much by the actor as the character, and equally that the objective is not contained within the stage, but reaches from stage to audience. Essentially, both actors are playing the same objective: to impress the audience, but one has the problem of being master and the other has the problem of being servant. The simplicity of those guidelines forces the performers to generate the context of the improvisation and, though we have already mentioned its secondary function in the game, this is key to the creation of clown material.
The clown’s dilemma, as we explored earlier, is encapsulated in the ‘come on and be funny’ exercise. He is thrown onstage to entertain the audience, but no one has told him how to do this. It is this moment of desperation, when the situation forces the clown to do the first thing that comes into his head, which exposes his absolute stupidity (and the stupidity of mankind). The spontaneous choice is invariably more stupid than a prepared idea and were the director to add to the Master Servant game by providing a detailed context, he would be reducing the possibilities. Though he might reduce the possibility of the flop (making things apparently more safe for the actors), he would also close the door on the lucky accident and the incomparable delights of the idiot’s imagination - his impulse. And so, the director’s skill in setting improvisations to create clown material is in giving them just enough, as little as possible, and putting them perpetually in the situation of, ‘I’ve come onstage and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do … so I’ll just do this’. This situation, in plural (‘we don’t know what to do’), is precisely the basis of another improvisation game, called ‘the Eurovision Song Contest’.
The game is played by groups of three or four, in turn, to the audience. The situation is this: ‘You are from a small country somewhere and one day you are gathered round the TV watching the Eurovision Song Contest. You are very impressed by the event and decide that it would be wonderful to represent your country for the first time in the next contest. You tell the government of your plans and they approve and the Eurovision Committee allow you to join the contest. The next year, you fly to Ireland where the contest is being held. It is the best time of your life and the hotel is wonderful and the people are glamorous and fantastic and the event itself lives up to all your expectations. You watch in awe of the other countries and then assemble in the wings for your performance. The presenters announce your country and you enter the stage full of enthusiasm. It is then that you realise you never wrote or rehearsed a song. But you don’t worry a great deal, you look at you friends and you think, ‘we’ll get through this, I trust the genius of my friends, we’ll be fine’. So you must give us a performance without any one player ‘leading’ or initiating an idea. Trust each other, be open and something will happen.’
PLAY CLIP 4
Stephan, Blake (from One Yellow Rabbit), Toby and Aitor
It is clear that the performance you have just seen could not be the product of someone’s ‘idea’. The noise they make and the action of holding hands are not necessarily funny in themselves. It is the stupidity of their solution to the clown’s problem ‘what do I do to entertain this audience?’ that makes us laugh.
‘The vulnerability of the
clown is what draws the audience. The clown wants to please … and it’s the
clown’s failure, despite hard work, which seduces the audience into laughter.’[5]
Once again, we see that the
content or action is secondary to the honesty with which the clowns play the
game. Resisting the urge to have ideas or lead the improvisation, they
can allow themselves to be surprised by their own stupidity and their own
imaginations – the impulse. Philippe Gaulier places huge importance on the
impulse, calling it the King of his school and the heart of good performance.
‘The impetus taken for the pleasure of going further, gives the joy of moving
effortlessly towards unknown territory.’[6]
Through the impulse we can engage the imagination directly, subverting the
usual process of selection our brain has time to undergo – the results can
often have a surreal logic, one that we intrinsically understand and one that
can remind us of the great boundless freedom our imagination uncovers if we
allow it to guide us. As when Laurel and Hardy follow their impulse to dance to
the music of the cowboys in Way Out West [7]
(fig.6) – ‘the sheer joy of an untrammelled freedom to express oneself, for no
apparent reason, in a crowded street, among strangers. We seldom do it, but we
know, in the often perplexing, annoying, harsh or plain humdrum progress of
life, that we should’[8].
When the clown comes onstage with nothing, his impulse is all he needs to
salvage the situation. What happens, however, when we follow Cal McCrystal away
from the archetypal clown problem?
fig.6 (Laurel and Hardy dancing in Way Out West)