COMEDY

Since 2002 I have been involved on and off with improvised comedy and associated theatre.

In 2002 I joined Cardiff University’s improv troupe, Theatre Anarchy as part of the cast for the show Utter Politics. In 2003 I directed the 90 minute long-form Theatre Anarchy show, The Life and Times Of… Most of us involved in that show went up to the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 with the show Hardcore 24/7 - a series of seven shows over two weeks, each one written, rehearsed and performed in just 24 hours. I was a performer and writer on the show, and following the Fringe Festival many of us performer/writers reunited to start a new improv group, The Fourth Chair, which lasted until 2006.

I’ll be honest, things with The Fourth Chair didn’t end well. Things got very personal and bitter and kind of scared me off improv for a while (as well as socialising/making friends with other people - but that’s another story for another day). It didn’t help my relationship with improv that my mother decided to take it up too, creating Improv Cape Cod in 2013 at the Cotuit Center for the Arts (nothing can make a hobby feel less appealing than your mom doing it too!) It was further not helped by my mom actually dying straight after running her final improv class (not from the improv; she was very sick with cancer). But at the same time, the joy it had given mom in her final months - and the joy it had given her students - reminded me of how fun improv could be. In 2014 I decided to dip my toe back into the waters and joined an improv class with Box of Frogs here in Birmingham.

The classes worked! I was remembering how fun improv could be and soon I was going to the weekly drop-in the group ran in Moseley, joining in with their free monthly short-form shows, and appearing in their bigger, longform, shows at the Blue Orange Theatre. A few of us in the group decided to take longform further and start our own longform group on the side. The Kneejerks began in a lounge in Moseley and ended in a lounge in Bournville, but in between, for several years, we ran a successful night once a month in the top floor room of The Victoria pub in Birmingham city centre until we - and audiences - grew tired of it. We also played several shows at random other venues across Birmingham, including several performances at the Birmingham Improv Festival (which I was also involved in running during its first year).

Since The Kneejerks came to an end in 2019, I started performing as part of Fat Penguin’s house team at their weekly shows at the Patrick Kavanagh in Moseley. However, when Covid-19 closed the shows, and the pubs, down in March of 2020 and the twice-weekly fix of improv stopped being part of my life (rehearsal Sunday, show on Thursday), I realised something eye-opening by about mid-April: of all the things I missed about the old, pre-Covid, life, I wasn’t missing improv at all. In fact, I’m still not missing it, to the point where, as I made this website compiling everything I do and have done - everything important to me - I almost forgot to include a page like this. It was only seeing a post by a fellow improviser on Facebook that I was reminded improv is something I do too.

Or did? Once things returned to “normal”, and theatre, and comedy, returned to pubs, I found, by choice, I was no longer part of the Birmingham improv scene. I hadn’t missed it and it no longer felt like something I needed to do, let alone something I wanted to do. I’m not sure why - but there you have it. Global pandemics have a habit of focusing the mind on what is important to you. As much of what we love was taken from us in that strange new world, writing, music, art - all these things sustained me. Meanwhile improv was something I seldom thought of.

It’s a great skill to have though. For many years I have run successful improv workshops with younger students - both one-day workshops and longer ten week courses - and enjoyed seeing the creativity improv can bring out in young people. These days I help run an improv activity at my school with students and doing that every so often has been enough. As a teacher, I “do improv” every lesson - working without a script to serve the simple premise that I am trying to teach these students something specific.

So I guess you could say I am a trained and experienced improviser who dips in and out of it at different points in his life. Currently I’ve dipped out beyond the school stuff, but history suggests I will dip in again one day…even if it takes eight years. So look out in 2028…