What did you want to be when you grew up? Astronaut? Firefighter? Pop star? Prime Minister? I wanted to not grow up. As I approached my 18th birthday, the horrifying realisation that ‘responsibility’ and ‘being sensible’ would soon be on the agenda scared the living daylights out of me. The idea of...
My lips twitched as I read the invitation. “The Nursery’s sternest ringmistress Heather Urquhart requests the pleasure of having you as a member of her company for a celebration of our nation’s finest scribe, Ms Jilly Cooper.” Surely that couldn’t be my name written in dark red ink, at the...
So Magicked, our homage to and deconstruction of the world of Harry Potter closed out the season a couple of Saturdays back. It involved a dementor dreaming of owning a Volvo and Dumbledore getting a job as a tour guide, while Ron spent twenty years inside a board game and...
Hey, you...
Let me start with a confession: I don’t like Harry Potter. I don’t dislike it either, it just never happened to me. I was fifteen when the first book came out and awkwardly pretentious enough to ignore it. Even as the juggernaut gathered momentum, I was more interested in Beckett,...
I think the space between pure unstructured improv and scripted plays is worth more exploration. I’m going to talk about the genesis of Open Roads in my experiences with roleplaying and the larger aims of this project. The format of Open Roads is an adaption of the roleplaying game Ribbon Drive...
I haven’t directed a show from the outside for many years, so I was excited and nervous about joining Micheal Such in creating Open Roads. I was intrigued by the idea, take a role-playing game and see if it could be adapted to the stage. I loved the concept of the...
Improv scenes with big, fun, hyperreal characters can be brilliant and funny to watch. The second “that guy” comes on stage, we know exactly what's coming next. We know, understand and empathise with the character because they have a clear and specific viewpoint which makes us laugh. And the comedy...