Making It Up On The Spot

I was at the Lyric last night with the man who likes to be known as Barry. We were there to see Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories an exercise in ‘long form’ improvisation by Cartoon de Salvo. What this meant in practice, was three performers – Alex Murdoch, Neil Haigh and the Guardian’s comedy critic Brian Logan – attempting to create a full length play from a few audience suggestions and their own imaginations.

As we entered the studio the three were seated on a small stage playing songs that included Tears On My Pillow and, of course, Hard Hearted Hannah, on an array of instruments that included a banjo, a cider jug and a washboard. But this was just a precursor to the show proper. In order to get started they ask the audience for potential titles. Someone, Maxie Szalwinska I think, suggested The Obituarist – which is a play I’d happily watch but in the end they went for The Forgotten One.

They also asked the audience to pick three songs from their playlist. These three songs would then have to be incorporated in some way into the show, this pre-arranged soundtrack the only semblance of structure it would have. The story we got involved astronauts, aliens and lonesome strangers who lived in box cars (though, as is the nature of the exercise, Lyn Gardner got to see an entirely different show involving an Icelandic woman and a butler, called The Birthday Party in a wry nod to the current production in the main house). The songs included New Delhi Freight Train and Mama Told Me Not To Come. And, it was pretty funny stuff, but more fascinating by far was watching the performers, watching them pick up the narrative thread from one another and drag the story off in unexpected directions. Sometimes they appeared in sync, picking up on cues and forwarding the story together, other times they seemed to be tugging it in different directions.

There were inevitable lulls and there was also a fair bit of corpsing but the chief pleasure came in watching the thing take shape. It doesn’t – or at least it didn’t on this occasion – quite escape the ‘gag-centred’ approach of Whose Line and its like, but it was very entertaining indeed. I do wonder what would happen if they went for a more dramatic and less obviously comic set-up – that would be very interesting to see and is something that does often happen (as Logan has pointed out on the Guardian blog). The finished thing, in this case, may have been rather lightweight, but the process remained enthralling – the way the performers built on each other’s ideas, the unexpected leaps of imagination – and the piece they produced held together, a fully formed story. There is risk involved of course, the risk that the thing will fail to click together, will flounder and fall apart, but that risk is part of the appeal. I’d like to see another one if I have time. It’s a shame it’s not on for longer.

Bah Humbug!

I feel somewhat torn. On one hand I am glad that a company like the RSC is willing to work with someone like Anthony Neilson, to do something a bit daring, a bit experimental, to take a chance on a more collaborative – and initially script-less – way of working. (Brian Logan goes into the details of the creative process on his GU blog).

But then I get to the show itself, the finished product, God In Ruins, which I saw last night at Soho Theatre with my friend Juice, and my enthusiasm wavers. I just didn’t think it was all that good. It didn’t even seem like a brave failure, more a muddle of ideas, many of which I’d seen better executed elsewhere. While Neilson’s previous work, The Wonderful World Of Dissocia managed to be compelling and infuriating in equal measure, this new one was – cardinal sin in Neilson’s book – kind of on the dull side: there was something rather tired and lifeless about the play, beneath all the swearing and shouting.

It starts with a mildly amusing prologue in which Ebenezer Scrooge, now fully redeemed after his encounter with his three ghosts, turns out to be just as insufferable in his new perky and life-loving incarnation as his old bah-humbug self. This did make me chuckle a little, but it was essentially one joke, and a rather over stretched one.

The play then jumps forward to the present and we meet Brian, a divorced, alcoholic reality TV producer. Having been rude to his ex-wife and failed to tip a pizza delivery man, he has his own Scrooge moment when he is visited by the white-suited ghost of dead dad, there to help him reconnect with his estranged daughter. Even at this early point in the evening there’s a seen-it-before feel to the set up: a heartless TV exec forced to confront his mortality, wasn’t that Scrooged? Even his reality shows have a ring of the familiar to them, like Chimp Monastery – Monkey Tennis, anyone?

There’s also an internet porn sequence that reminded me of Closer, even more so when the truth behind it is revealed, and a not–quite-as-funny-as-it-could-have-been interlude where two small boys discuss the fact that Santa is actually dead and it’s their parents that really buy the presents, which features liberal use of the underused put down ‘pooh head.’

This is followed by a bizarrely studenty, post-modern moment when the characters become aware that they are in a theatre and that they are being watched by an audience. A further layer of artifice is then peeled away as a ‘real’ homeless man bursts into the auditorium and interrupts proceedings, claiming to be an ex-soldier, just back, oddly, from Iran. If this was meant to indicate a slightly futuristic setting, it passed me by – I was too busy wondering why Scrooge from the opening sequence had popped up to help Brian on his way; was he a ghost? A drunken hallucination? Did it even matter?

To be fair, there were a handful of good gags, but most of the laughter I could hear was of the uneasy ‘this is supposed to be a funny bit, right?’ type – forced and awkward. As a whole, the production often seemed to be striving incredibly hard to be anarchic, and coming nowhere near. Brian, eventually finds his daughter, in Second Life, but as Juice pointed out to me in the bar afterwards, he was actually desperate to get in touch with her at the start and was only unable to because he was pissed out of his head, so it’s not much of a redemption. Though there’s also a suggestion that Brian’s unhappiness might be down to some latent homosexuality on his part.

I don’t know, I hate to tip a bagful of negative over a work that takes risks, that tries something different, but none of the disparate elements of this show seemed to fit well with one another and, on top of that, there was a sense of over-confidence to the thing – a touch of swagger about it – that I found very off-putting.