Even by normal standards of unlikely theatre destinations, my swing between Claremont High School in Harrow for an RSC Hamlet and Hoxton Hall in Shoreditch for the 2010 London Improvathon on Friday was something of a surprise stretch.

In the morning, the RSC gave a Press opening to their touring Hamlet in the school gym to an audience of remarkably attentive eleven and twelve year-olds.

The play was zipped through in seventy minutes — no Fortinbras, no Gravediggers, no problem — and Dharmesh Patel was a lively, freaked-out prince.

The RSC sets great store by its “learning” policy, as indicated by the presence among the kids and critics of chairman Christopher Bland, artistic director Michael Boyd and other big wigs.

But the long term ensemble members must take a lot from this, too, and there were lively contributions from young players like Gruffud Glyn and Dyfan Dwyfor as a Siamese twin-style Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in straw boaters, Debbie Korley as a strong Ophelia, cradling her dead father’s clothes and scattering flower petals in the audience, and Kirsty Woodward as a willowy Gertrude.

The clever edit was by Tarrell Alvin McCraney (who also directed) and Bijan Sheibani, even managing to make presentation cliches like black umbrellas, rustling silk streams and glass of water sound effects look and sound like fresh ideas.

I’d hardly battled my way back across north London when I had to set off for Hoxton Hall, where the Sticking Place and Die Nasty (the improv crowd from Edmonton, Alberta) launched their third 50-hour improvathon, We Are Not Amused.

Thirty actors have their characters — Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, Charles Dickens, a violent nurse, an intrepid explorer, some unlikely beer-guzzling cowpokes from Albuquerque, and so on — and their scenes are “called” by the director Dana Anderson at the side of the auditorium, where he sits at a long table with assistants, a few musicians, a lighting designer.

Each “shift” plays for one hour and forty or forty-five minutes, with a fifteen minute break befor the next one starts.

They were still at it when I returned to Shoreditch for the last two shifts on Sunday afternoon.

It’s absolutely incredible, really, the actors entering another zone of reality in their concentration, struggling to create a theatrical context where the occasional spark is struck or nugget unleashed.

During the course of the weekend, a plot involving three chocolatiers had mysteriously developed and we suddenly found Alan Cox as Dante Gabriel Rossetti bursting forth on an upper level as Willy Wonka, leading the chorus of starving orphans in a chorus of hope that was staged with the passion of Oliver! and bathed in the beautiful lighting of Les Miserables.

Even more amazingly, Ruth Bratt’s crinoline-swinging Queen played a scene of devastating, uncompromised pathos as Prince Albert conked out in her arms; the actor, you felt, had simply died of exhaustion.

The Canadian actors do this sort of thing all the time, and Dana Anderson has been directing what they call long form improvisation for twenty years. Our actors are comparatively new to it, but regulars like Oliver Senton, Lucy Trodd, Pippa Evans, Sean McCann, Josh Darcy and Adam Meggido, who organises things at this end, acquitted themselves admirably.

In an opium den scene, Senton confessed to Darcy that he was feeling paranoid. “I’m not surprised,” came the reply, “high as a kite and up for fifty hours; that’s a pretty heady mix.”
 
I’m sorry I missed Charles Dickens’s klezma band — Dizzy and the Railies — and the unscripted (what wasn’t?) appearance of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, but there were enough ladies of ill repute and odd things going off to compensate for the loss.

There was a good thread sustained by the media mogul Francis U Cund and a transexual urchin newsboy, and somehow Prince Albert’s invention of the pickle (using mathematics) led to a scene of contrition and an outing to see the Pirates of Penance.

The show seeemd to be tailing away badly towards the end, and an orphan chorus of “We’re all special in our own special way” was not exactly the rousing finale perhaps we should have expected.

But hey, this isn’t really theatre: this is blood sports, and the wonder of it is not how well it is done but the fact that it is done at all. I just like the idea of thirty actors strewn across London lying in dark room recovery and moaning quietly in their sleep.  
 
 

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 10:40 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.