1
Playboy: | Knife in the Water was an original, and unusual screenplay. Where did you get the idea for it? |
Polanski: | It was the sum of several desires in me. I loved the lake area in Poland and I thought it would make a great setting for a film. I was thinking of a film with a limited number of people in it as a form of challenge. I hadn’t ever seen a film with only three characters, where no one else even appeared in the background. The challenge was to make it in a way that the audience wouldn’t be aware of the fact that no one else had appeared even in the background. As for the idea, all I had in mind when I began the script was a scene where two men were on a sailboat and one fell overboard. But that was a starting-point, wouldn’t you agree? |
Playboy: | Certainly, but a strange one. Why were you thinking about a man falling out of a sailboat? |
Polanski: | There you go, asking me how to shrink my head again. I don’t know why. I was interested in creating a mood, an atmosphere, and after the film came out, a lot of critics found all sorts of symbols and hidden meanings in it that I hadn’t even thought of. It made me sick. (Playboy, December, 1971.) |
I started my work on narrative by trying to make the improvisers conscious of the implications of the scenes they played. I felt that an artist ought to be ‘committed’, and that he should be held responsible for the effects of his work—it seemed only common sense. I got my students to analyse the content of Red Riding Hood and The Sleeping Beauty and Moby Dick and The Birthday Party, but this made them even more inhibited. I didn’t realise that if the people who thought up Red Riding Hood had been aware of the implications, then they might never have written the story. This was at a time when I had no inspiration as a writer at all, but I didn’t twig that the more I tried to understand the ‘real’ meaning, the less I wrote. When Pinter directs his own plays he may say ‘We may assume that what the author intended here is …’—and this is a sensible attitude: the playwright is one person and the director another, even when they share the same skull.
When I ran the Royal Court’s script department, I used to read about fifty plays a week, and many of them seemed to betray their author’s conscious intention. At one time there was a glut of plays about homosexual lovers whose happiness, or even lives, are destroyed by the opposition of ignorant bigots. I didn’t see these as pro-homosexual although I’m sure their authors did. If I wrote such a play my homosexuals would live happily ever after, just as my Goldilocks would end up living in a commune with the bears. Recent films in which the good lawman comes to grief when he tries to fight the system (Walking Tall, Serpico) have the moral ‘Don’t stick your neck out’, but this may not be what their directors intend. In the old days the honest sheriff was triumphant; nowadays he’s crippled, or dead. Content lies in the structure, in what happens, not in what the characters say.
Even at the level of geometrical signs ‘meaning’ is ambiguous. A cross, a circle, and a swastika contain a ‘content’ quite apart from those which we assign to them. The swastika is symmetrical but unbalanced: it’s a good sign for power, it has a clawiness about it (cartoonists drew swastika spiders scrabbling over the face of Europe). The circle is stiller, is a much better sign for eternity, for completeness. The cross can stand for many things, for a meeting-place, for a crossroads, for a kiss, for a reed reflected in a lake, for a mast, for a sword—but it isn’t meaningless just because the interpretations aren’t one-for-one. Whatever a cross suggests to us it won’t have the same associations as a circle, which makes a much better sign for a moon, for example, or for pregnancy. Moby Dick may be a symbol for the ‘life-force’, or for ‘evil’ and we can add anything it suggests to us, but the area of legitimate association is limited. There are things the white whale doesn’t symbolise, as well as things it does, and once you start combining signs together in a narrative the whole thing becomes too complex. A story is as difficult to interpret as a dream, and the interpretation of a dream depends on who’s doing the interpreting. When King Lear really gets going—the mad King, the man pretending to be mad, the fool paid to be mad, and the whole mass of overlapping and contradictory associations—what can the spectator sensibly do but be swept away on the flood, and experience the play, instead of trying to think what it ‘means’.
My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realised that every play makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry about content if he’s trying to fake up a personality he doesn’t actually have, or to express views he really isn’t in accord with. I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any artist. If you want to write a ‘working-class play’ then you’d better be working class. If you want your play to be religious, then be religious. An artist has to accept what his imagination gives him, or screw up his talent.
Alex Comfort once filmed some of my work, and he seemed surprised when I told him that my students never attacked me physically. He’d been explaining that I was really operating as a therapist, that I was coaxing students into areas that would normally be ‘forbidden’, and that spontaneity means abandoning some of your defences.
I didn’t have an answer at the time, except to say ‘Well, they don’t’, but my refusal to attribute any importance to content may be the answer. If my students produce disturbing material I link it with ideas of my own, or with something someone else has produced, and I stop them feeling isolated or ‘peculiar’. Whatever dredges up from their unconscious I’ll accept, and treat as ‘normal’. If I seized on the content of scenes as revealing secrets about the student, then I’d be perceived as a threat. They’d have to ‘love’ me, or ‘hate’ me. I’d have negative and positive transference states to contend with—which would be a hindrance.
Once you decide to ignore content it becomes possible to understand exactly what a narrative is, because you can concentrate on structure.
My dictionary says a story is ‘a sequence of events that have, or are alleged to have happened, a series of events that are or might be narrated … a person’s account of his life or some portion of it … a narrative of real or, more usually fictitious events, designed for the entertainment of the hearer …’ and so on. Even a small child knows that a story isn’t just a series of events, because he says ‘And is that the end?’ If we say ‘A story is a series of events that might be narrated’ then we beg the question, which is : ‘Why do we narrate one series of events but not another?’
I had to decide what a story was, and present a theory that an improviser could use on the spur of the moment in any situation. Obviously, the ‘seventeen basic plots’ approach would be too limiting. I needed a way to handle anything that cropped up.
Suppose I make up a story about meeting a bear in the forest. It chases me until I come to a lake. I leap into a boat and row across to an island. On the island is a hut. In the hut is a beautiful girl spinning golden thread. I make passionate love to the girl …
I am now ‘storytelling’ but I haven’t told a story. Everyone knows it isn’t finished. I could continue forever in the same way: Next morning I am walking around the island when an eagle seizes me and carries me high into the sky. I land on a cloud and find a path leading to Heaven. To one side of the path I notice a lake with three swans. One of the swans suddenly disappears, and an old man stands in his place …
The trouble with such a sequence is that there’s no place where it can stop, or rather, that it can stop anywhere; you are unconsciously waiting for another activity to start, not free association, but reincorporation.
Let’s begin the story again: I escape from a bear by rowing across to an island. Inside a hut on the island is a beautiful girl bathing in a wooden tub. I’m making passionate love to her when I happen to glance out of the window. If I now see the bear rowing across in a second boat, then there was some point in mentioning him in the first place. If the girl screams ‘My lover!’ and hides me under the bed, then this is better storytelling, since I’ve not only reintroduced the bear, but I’ve also linked him to the girl. The bear enters the hut, unzips his skin, and emerges as the grey old man who makes love to the girl. I creep out of the hut taking the skin with me so that he can’t change back into a bear. I run down to the shore and row back to the mainland, towing the second boat behind me (reintroducing the boats). Then I see the old man paddling after me in the tub. He seems incredibly strong and there’s no escape from him. I wait for him among the trees, and pull the bearskin around myself. I become a bear and tear him to pieces—thus I’ve reincorporated both the man and the skin. I row back to the island and find the girl has vanished. The hut has become very old and the roof is sagging in, and trees that were young saplings are now very tall. Then I try to remove the skin and I find it’s sealed up around me.
At this point a child would probably say ‘And is that the end?’ because clearly some sort of pattern has been completed. Yet at no time have I thought about the content of the scene. I presume it’s about sexual anxieties and fear of old age, or whatever. Had I ‘known’ this, then I wouldn’t have constructed that particular story, but as usual the content has looked after itself, and anyway is only of interest to critics or psychologists. What matters to me is the ease with which I ‘free-associate’ and the skill with which I reincorporate.
Here’s a ‘good night’ story made up by me and Dorcas (age six).
‘What do you want a story about?’ I asked.
‘A little bird,’ she said.
‘That’s right. And where did this little bird live?’
‘With Mummy and Daddy bird.’
‘Mummy and Daddy looked out of the nest one day and saw a man coming through the trees. What did he have in his hand?’
‘An axe.’
‘And he took the axe and started chopping down all the trees with a white mark on. So Daddy bird flew out of the nest, and do you know what he saw on the bark of his tree?’
‘A white mark.’
‘Which meant?’
‘The man was going to cut down their tree.’
‘So the birds all flew down to the river. Who did they meet?’
‘Mr Elephant.’
‘Yes. And Mr Elephant filled his trunk with water and washed the white mark away from the tree. And what did he do with the water left in his trunk?’
‘He squirted it over the man.’
‘That’s right. And he chased the man right out of the forest and the man never came back.’
‘And is that the end of the story?’
‘It is.’
At the age of six she has a better understanding of storytelling than many university students. She links the man to the birds by giving him an axe. She links up the water left in the trunk with the woodcutter, whom she remembers we’d shelved. She isn’t concerned with content but any narrative will have some (about insecurity, I suppose).
I say to an actress, ‘Make up a story.’ She looks desperate, and says, ‘I can’t think of one.’
‘Any story,’ I say. ‘Make up a silly one.’
‘I can’t,’ she despairs.
‘Suppose I think of one and you guess what it is.’
At once she relaxes, and it’s obvious how very tense she was.
‘I’ve thought of one,’ I say, but I’ll only answer “Yes”, “No”, or “Maybe”:
She likes this idea and agrees, having no idea that I’m planning to say ‘Yes’ to any question that ends in a vowel, ‘No’ to any question that ends in a consonant, and ‘Maybe’ to any question that ends with the letter ‘Y’.
For example, should she ask me ‘Is it about a horse?’ I’ll answer ‘Yes’ since ‘horse’ ends in an ‘E’.
‘Does the horse have a bad leg?’
‘No.’
‘Does it run away?’
‘Maybe …’
She can now invent a story easily, but she doesn’t feel obliged to be ‘creative’, or ‘sensitive’ or whatever, because she believes the story is my invention. She no longer feels wary, and open to hostile criticism, as of course we all are in this culture whenever we do anything spontaneously. Her first question is:
‘Has the story got any people in it?’
‘No.’
‘Has it got animals in it?’
‘No.’
‘Has it got buildings in it?’
‘Yes: (I’m having to drop my rule about consonants, or she’d get too discouraged.)
‘Does the building have anything to do with the story?’ ‘Maybe.’
‘Does it have aeroplanes in it?’
‘No.’
‘Fish?’
‘No.’
‘Insects?’
‘Yes:
‘Do the insects play a large part in the story?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Do they live underground?’
‘No.’
‘Do they start out as harmless?’
‘No.’
‘Do the insects take over the world?’
‘Yes:
‘Are they as big as elephants?’
‘Do they take any poison?’
‘No!’
‘Is it a gradual process, this taking over of the world?’
‘No.’
‘Were there many insects?’
‘No.’
‘Do the insects gain anything by destroying the world?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do they reign utterly alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do they destroy the world in a foul manner?’
‘No.’
‘Does the story begin with their existing?’
‘No.’
‘But there aren’t any people in this bloody story. So it must start with the insects. Have the insects been reigning alone in the world for a long time?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do they live in the buildings that used to be the people’s buildings?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then they suddenly decide to destroy the world?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they don’t die. And when they eat everything in sight they become larger?’
‘Yes.’
‘And then they can’t fit into the buildings again?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is that the end of the story?’
‘It is.’
If she got more than two Nos’ in a row I sometimes said ‘Yes’ to encourage her, and in the end I said ‘yes’ all the time because she was getting discouraged. We used to play this game at parties, and people who claim to be unimaginative would think up the most astounding stories, so long as they remained convinced that they weren’t responsible for them. The great joke was to lure somebody into inventing a story about a midget dentist sexually assaulting Siamese twins, or whatever, wait until he accused you of having really perverted minds, and then explain triumphantly that he had created the story himself. Faubion Bowers once wrote an article on this game, in, I think, Playboy.
To some extent such stories are due to chance, but you can see in the last example that a story is struggling to get out. She doesn’t ask ‘Are the insects harmless?’, she says ‘Do they start out as harmless?’ so that you know she has the intention of creating some destructive force. She also wants them to be big. She says ‘Are they as big as elephants?’ and gets the answer ‘No’, but she still ends up getting them gigantic, since they eat so much that they can’t fit into the buildings. She’s been lured into constructing one of the basic myths of our culture, the apparently harmless force that destroys the environment—and itself. Notice how she shapes the story by recapitulation. She links the buildings and the insects, and she reintroduces the buildings again at the end. She says, ‘Is that the end?’ because she knows she’s linked up the story. It must be obvious that when someone insists that they ‘can’t think up a story’, they really mean that they ‘won’t think up a story’—which is OK by me, so long as they understand it’s a refusal, rather than a ‘lack of talent’.
2
The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future. His story can take him anywhere, but he must still ‘balance’ it, and give it shape, by remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them. Very often an audience will applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story. They couldn’t tell you why they applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure. Sometimes they even cheer! They admire the improviser’s grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily forgotten.
It seems obvious to teach storytelling as two separate activities. I get the actors to work in pairs, with Actor A telling a story for thirty seconds, and then with Actor B finishing it for thirty seconds. Actor A is to provide disconnected material, and Actor B is somehow to connect it.
Or again:
A: | An old lady sits in her lighthouse very worried because the sea has dried up and there are no ships for her light to warn. In the middle of the desert a tap has been dripping since the beginning of time. In the heart of the jungle, in a little hut, an old man sits cross-legged … |
B: | … ‘I can’t stand that dripping sound,’ he cries, leaping up and making a great journey to the centre of the desert. Nothing he can do will stop the tap dripping. ‘At least I can turn it on,’ he cries. Immediately the desert flourishes, the seas fill up again, and the old lady is very happy. She travels to the jungle to thank the old man, and ever afterwards keeps a picture of him and his hut above the mantelpiece in the lighthouse. |
And again:
A: | A man sits in a cave surrounded by pieces of bicycles. There is a fire outside the cave, and a woman is sending up smoke signals. Some children are playing in the river. An aeroplane passes over the valley and breaks the sound barrier . |
B: | … The sonic boom makes the children look up. They see the smoke signals. ‘Daddy mended the bicycles,’ they shout. When they run back to the cave a strange sight meets their eyes: not bicycles, but a flying-machine made out of all the pieces. Leaping on, they all pedal into the air, and fly around the valley all day. |
Sometimes Actor A will try to make it ‘easy’ for Actor B. This actually makes it more difficult.
I’m not saying that this method produces great literature, but you can get people inventing stories who previously claimed they could never think of any.
Once people have learned to play each stage of this game with no effort or anxiety, I let them play both halves themselves. I say ‘Free-associate’, and then when they’ve produced unconnected material, I say ‘Connect’, or ‘Reincorporate’.
A knowledge of this game is very useful to a writer. First of all it encourages you to write whatever you feel like; it also means that you look back when you get stuck, instead of searching forwards. You look for things you’ve shelved, and then reinclude them.
If I want people to free-associate, then I have to create an environment in which they aren’t going to be punished, or in any way held responsible for the things their imagination gives them. I devise techniques for taking the responsibility away from the personality. Some of these games are very enjoyable and others, at first encounter, are rather frightening; people who play them alter their view of themselves. I protect the students, encourage them and reassure them that they’ll come to no harm, and then coax them or trick them into letting the imagination off its leash.
One way to bypass the censor who holds our spontaneity in check is to distract him, or overload him. I might ask someone to write out a paragraph on paper (without premeditation) while counting backwards aloud from a hundred. I’ll try it now as I’m typing:
‘Extra. I fall through the first storey of the car park. The driver throughout the night thought the soft concrete slit his genitals thoughtfully. Nurse Grimshaw fell further . .
I got to sixty until I felt my brain was going to explode. It’s like trying to write after a severe concussion. Try it. It’s very surprising to see what something in you ‘wants’ to write when it gets the chance.
You might try drawing a picture with two hands at once. The trick is to keep your attention equally divided, rather than switching quickly from hand to hand. Also you shouldn’t decide what to draw; just sit down with a blank mind and draw as quickly as possible. This regresses your mind to about five years of age. Curiously, each hand seems to draw with the same level of skill.
Lists
If I tell a student, ‘Say a word’, he’ll probably gawp. He wants a context in which his answer will be ‘right’. He wants his answer to bring credit to him, that’s what he’s been taught answers are for.
‘Why can’t you just say whatever comes into your head?’
‘Yes, well, I don’t want to speak nonsense.’
‘Any word would have done. A spontaneous reply is never nonsense.’ This puzzles him.
‘All right,’ I say, ‘just name me a list of objects, but as quick as you can.’
‘Er … cat, dog, mouse, trap, dark cellar . .
He trails off, because he feels that the list is somehow revealing something about himself. He wants to keep his defences up. When you act or speak spontaneously, you reveal your real self, as opposed to the self you’ve been trained to present.
Nonsense results from a scrambling process, and takes time. You have to consider your thought, decide whether it gives you away, and then distort it, or replace it with something else. The student’s ‘trap’ and ‘dark cellar’ were threatening to release some anxiety in him. If he’d continued with the list, speaking as quickly as possible, he’d have revealed himself as not quite so sane and secure as he pretends. I’ll try typing out some nonsense as fast as I can and see what I get.
‘The lobster bites the foot. Freda leaps skyward, back falling prone on to the long breakwater. Archie Pellingoe the geologist leaping up around down and upon her lovingly chews her alabaster sandwich . .
This is still partly scrambled, because I can’t type quickly enough. I managed to censor some of it, but I wasn’t able to remove all the sexual content. I veered away from the lobster suspecting the image to be vaguely erotic, but it got worse. The only way I could have made it meaningless would be to type more slowly, and to substitute other images. This is what my students do all the time. I ask them for an idea and they say … oh … aahh … urn …’ as if they couldn’t think of one. The brain constructs the universe for us, so how is it possible to be ‘stuck’ for an idea? The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that arrive uninvited.
I make my students improvise lists of objects to make them understand that there are two processes they can use. You can make rational jumps from one object to the next: ‘Dog, cat, milk, saucer, spoon, fork …’ or you can improvise a non-associative list. I’ll type out one as quickly as I can. ‘Duck, rhomboid, platypus, elephant’s egg, cactus, Johnnie Ray, clock face, East Acton …’ It’s like emptying all sorts of garbage from your mind that you didn’t know was there. Try it. It’s more difficult than you think, but it stops people caring what comes out of their minds. I’ll try again. ‘Dead nun, postbox, cat-o-nine-tails, cement hopper, mouse-juice, Pope Urban the Eighth, a blob, giant opera singer, piece of lettuce, a kazoo, a vivisected clown, a lump of interstellar dust, limpet shell, moving lava, red minibus, stamen, sickle-cell anaemia . . .’
A sequential list feels like one you ‘think up’. A non-sequential list seems to arrive by itself. One day I’m sure there’ll be an explanation for the two processes. Students choose the first way, and have to be coaxed into attempting the second. They feel as if they’re being bombarded with the thoughts of someone else. They can’t understand why such bizarre lists should occur to them. I tell them that it’s perfectly natural, and that hypnagogic images come in the same way.
Associating Images
One of the earliest games we played at the studio involved associating images. We developed it from word-association games and we found that if someone gives an image suddenly, this will automatically trigger off another image in his partner’s mind. Someone says ‘A lobster …’ and someone answers ‘With a flower in its claw’, and the juxtaposition does imply a content: ‘A torn photograph …’ ‘… An empty room’; ‘Basket of eggs … ” … Cement mixer’. Afterwards you can see that a lobster with a flower in its claw is a good symbol of insensitivity, for someone locked out of the world of feeling, and so on, yet none of these associations were conscious at the moment that the pairing image jerked out.
Here’s some genuine nonsense assembled by C. E. Shannon and based on word-probabilities :
‘The head and frontal attack on an English writer that the character of this point is therefore another method for the letters that the time of whoever told the problem for an unexpected …’ and so on. This is not the sort of thing spewed out by the unconscious.
One way to trigger off narrative material is to put the students in groups of three, and have them invent a name for a character, and see if they can agree on what he’s like. For example:
‘Betty Plum.’
‘Big breasts.’
‘Yes. A barmaid.’
‘Er …
‘Well, she has worked as a barmaid …
‘Yes.’
‘Lives in a room with blue curtains.’
‘A stuffed toy dog on the dresser …
‘Which she keeps her nightdress in.’
‘Nylon.’
The group continue until they know who she lives with, her taste in music, her secret ambition, the sorrow in her life, etc. The important thing is that the students should really agree, they shouldn’t just make compromises. As soon as one person disagrees they wipe the character out, and start on another. Soon they learn to develop a character much further, and in a way that satisfies all of them. ‘George Honeywell—keeps bees—smokes a pipe—married—was married—in love with the daughter of the tobacconist—wears a soft cap—he’s a voyeur—likes dogs …’ And so on.
Automatic Writing
Automatic writing is one way of getting students to understand that there is ‘something inside them besides themselves’. Normally this skill is rare, but I have invented a method that works for most people; actually I suppose I should call it ‘automatic reading’. Here’s how I coaxed a poem from a volunteer at a public lecture.
‘Mime taking a book from a shelf,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘What colour is it?’
‘Blue.’
‘Did you have to think up the colour or did you see it?’
‘It was blue.’
‘Open it at the flyleaf. Can you see the name of the publisher?’
‘It’s faint.’
‘Spell it.’
H … o … d … Hodson.’
‘And the name of the book?’
‘Yes.’
‘The …
‘Yes … try to spell it.’
‘C … country.’
‘In the Country … author?’
‘Alex … ander Pope.’
‘Open it till you come to a page of verse. What’s the page number?’
‘Thirty-nine.’
‘Find me a line of verse.’
‘So that we …
‘Are you seeing it or inventing it?’
‘Seeing it.’
‘Next word.’
‘It’s blurred.’
‘I’ve given you a magnifying-glass …
I continued drawing the poem out of her, until she’d ‘read’ two verses. Then I stopped because she was finding the experience frightening. So did the audience, because it really didn’t seem to be a poem she was inventing, yet someone was inventing it.
So that we can be happy
Together in our loves
Since you were away
I have been alone.
Having been so close
I cannot live again
Many years will pass
Till I live again.
The personality will often try to resist this method by saying ‘It’s in Russian’, or ‘It’s too tiny to read the print’, and so on. I say ‘There’s something written in English in the margin’ or ‘I’m shrinking you down to the size of the book’, or something suitable. It’s easy to switch from ‘automatic reading’ to my form of ‘automatic writing’. You just look at a blank sheet of paper, and ‘see’ a word, and then write it where you ‘saw’ it. I’ve filled many exercise books using this method, partly to see where it led me, and partly to know what happens if you go past the point where you feel impelled to stop. I’ve learned a lot about myself this way. Again there’s a great gap between what I would choose to write, and what actually emerges. Here’s a bit that sounds like a statement about the imagination.
The great dragon dare not stir
The trainer watches kindly but
At the slightest movement taps it on the nose
The eyes glint fire and yet the muscles dare
Not exert themselves nor let the flame burst forth
Which would engulf the city in one flash.
The trainer speaks of kindness and consoles
And says he is the dragon’s only friend
Sometimes the dragon purrs but oh the pain
Of never moving those enormous limbs.
Here’s another one, not at all like ‘my’ writing.
Windmills
The vanes split apart
All the mechanism rusts
Growing children talk
Words turn to dust.
Look where the ocean
Clogged with oil stands
Still struggling seabird
Below on black sand.
Where on the headland
Does a lighthouse blaze now?
The endless waves mount
Desire fails below.
‘Dreams’
A game we got from America uses relaxation to bypass the censor. It’s used by psychologists, and I’ve seen dire warnings about other people using it. Most psychologists who use games rely very heavily on the discoveries of people working in the theatre, and my guess is that the ‘guided dream’ came from the theatre in the first place. (Frederick Perls says he was once a pupil of Max Reinhardt!) Anyway, I think the warnings are due to the same kind of fear that Mask work and hypnosis inspire. It’s true that if someone is hovering on the edge of insanity one little push may topple him over, but a bus trip can be just as disturbing as anything that happens in a theatre class.
If I get you to lie down, close your eyes and relax, and report what your imagination gives you, then you’ll probably go into a deep state of absorption, and instead of ‘thinking things up’ the experiences will seem to be really happening to you. Afterwards, if I ask ‘Did you feel the floor?’ then you’ll probably say, ‘There wasn’t any floor.’ If I say, ‘Did you experience your body?’ you’ll probably answer, ‘I wasn’t in my body’ or ‘I was in the body I had in the story.’
I begin by suggesting something like ‘You’re on a beach?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it sandy or stony?’
‘Sandy.’
‘Did you think that up?’
‘No, I just knew.’
It’s very likely that the student will want to stay on the beach and not be moved. I ask if he can see anything, or anyone, but he’ll usually be alone. I tell him he’s lain on the beach a long time, and then I suggest that he moves to the water, or away from it. If I don’t tell him he’s been there a long time, he’ll probably refuse to ‘get up’. The sort of story I’ll expect to get may involve him walking along the shore, passing a cave. I may suggest he looks in the cave, or wades into the ocean, but probably he’ll prefer to go on walking. Maybe he walks up to the top of the cliffs and looks down. Then I stop him.
Most people will have a good experience with this game, and sometimes it’s like paradise. It can also be pretty hellish. I watch their breathing, and if they seem alarmed I take them out, or steer them towards something less alarming. I coax them near to threatening areas : I’ll suggest they enter the cave or swim in the ocean, but I won’t push them.
Once the basic technique is mastered, I let students try it again. This time they’ll be bolder. They’ll encounter other people, they’ll have adventures, but I’ll still guide them away from ‘bad trips’. I’m using the game to demonstrate to the student that he can be effortlessly creative, not to teach him that his imagination is terrifying and should be suppressed! People can get upset playing the game, but if they weep you can cuddle them, which makes them feel better. When people abreact I always establish that (I) it’s good for them; (2) they’ll feel marvellous in half an hour; (3) it ‘happens to everybody’.
Advanced students, whom you know well, may want to set off on deeper and more fearful journeys. That’s all right when they know what they’re doing. One way is to have them cuddled by other students while they play the game. If they start to express great alarm, take them out, be calm, tell them to open their eyes, rock them if necessary. Two people can go on a journey together, each trying to have the same fantasy. The essential thing is not that the student should abreact, but that he should have the experience of imagining something ‘effortlessly’, and ‘choicelessly’. He should understand through this game that he doesn’t have to do anything in order to imagine, any more than he needs to do anything in order to relax or perceive.
Here’s a dream in which I was the questioner, and the ‘victim’ a drama student.
‘What sort of stories do you like?’
‘Science fiction. Well … Tolkien. Stories like The Hobbit.’
‘OK. Imagine a lake surrounded by mountains.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are swimming in the lake.’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you see any fish?’
‘Yes.’
‘Large ones?’
‘No.’
‘Shoals of little ones turning and darting?’
‘Yes.’
‘There is one particular fish. What do you do with it?’
‘I catch it.’
‘You swim back to the shore and three hooded figures are waiting for you. What do you give them?’
‘The fish.’
‘And what do they give you in exchange?’
‘A stick.’
‘What do you do with it?’
‘I point it at an oak tree and it vanishes.’
‘And then?’
‘I point it at the three hooded figures and they vanish too.’
‘You set out through the woods. Does the path lead up or down?’
‘Up.’
‘What do you hear? Is it from your right or your left?’
‘Left. Someone crying.’
‘You look down into a clearing and see a woman surrounded by …?
‘Little men.’
‘What’s she wearing? Anything?’
‘She’s naked.’
‘The little men see you?’
‘They’re coming at me waving sticks.’
‘She says it’s not me who did it.’
‘Was it someone from the castle?’
‘Yes, he threw her out naked into the forest.’
‘Do you help her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you go up the path?’
‘I put my cloak round her and we set off to the castle.’
‘It gets dark?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you are going to sleep?’
‘We cover ourselves with leaves and we lie about eight feet apart.’
‘You’re fast asleep when you wake up to feel her touching you.’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s she after?’
‘The stick.’
‘Does she get it?’
‘Yes.’
‘She points it at you and what happens?’
‘It goes all grey and wintry.’
‘What do you see in the mist?’
‘A huge oak tree, and three hooded figures leaping about and shouting.’
At this point the story has obviously ended (because of a brilliant reincorporation), and we roll about on the floor roaring with laughter. We’re very pleased to have co-operated so effortlessly.
You’ll notice that my suggestions are mostly in the form of questions. He said ‘Yes’ to most of them, because we had a good rapport, and I knew what to ask. Such ‘dreams’ are intensely real to the person lying down, and pretty vivid to the questioner. This happened years ago, but I still have the ‘vision’ of the story sharp in my mind. I could easily draw illustrations to every part of it. To be a good questioner you have to enter something like the same trance state as the person answering.
‘Experts’
When Vahktangov, one of Stanislavsky’s favourite pupils, was directing Turandot he asked the wise men to set themselves impossible problems. When they were onstage they were always to be secretly trying to solve problems like ‘How do you make a fly the size of an elephant?’
I adapted this idea to use in ‘interviews’. One actor plays a TV interviewer, and his partner becomes an ‘expert’ who has to convince us that he’s an authority on his subject.
The best way to think up the questions is to start a sentence without knowing how it’s going to end. You say: ‘Good evening … We are fortunate enough to have Professor Trout in the studio with us, who has just returned from Africa where he has been teaching hippopotamuses to …’ You have no idea what to say next, but almost anything will do: ‘… to do handstands’ or ‘… to yodel’. If you try to ‘think up’ impossible questions, it’s very difficult. Once you start the sentence ‘How do you turn a pig into …’ it’s very easy to conclude it ‘… a fire station’.
If you are asked, ‘How do you teach hippopotamuses to knit?’ you are likely to hedge: ‘Well now, we have, as you know, a large number of these hippopotamuses which the Government has assembled in the hope that they will eventually boost Kenya’s export trade. We’re hoping to sell about ten thousand pullovers a year soon.’ You waffle on like that, hoping that a nice idea will occur to you, but this isn’t a good way of really amazing an audience. It’s much better to give any answer. The interviewer’s job is to hold the ‘expert’ to the problem of answering.
‘Yes, but how exactly did you teach them?’
‘It was the carrot and the whip really.’
‘But what techniques?’
The ‘expert’ has agreed to answer the problem as part of the game, and he understands that the interviewer is trying to help him in demanding an immediate answer. Once he ‘jumps in’, and stops hedging, the game is simple.
“Well, I demonstrated the stitches. Then I gave them sharpened telegraph poles and about a mile of barbed wire.’
‘Didn’t they have trouble holding onto the poles?’
‘Yes, well they would. They lack the opposed thumb. They do have quite good co-ordination though, and are very suited to activities of a repetitive nature.’
‘But how exactly did they hold the poles?’
‘Ah! Leather pole-holders strapped on to the forearms, or, er, in common parlance, feet.’
‘But the pullovers, weren’t they rather uncomfortable?’
‘Terrible. We were starting with barbed wire and telegraph poles just to give them the general idea. If you try with wool right away, they keep snapping it.’
‘It’s all a matter of grading. You get ‘em on to rope, and then string, and finally they’ll be doing crochet.’
‘Do you have any examples of their work?’
‘I’m wearing it. Every article of my clothing was knitted by the Kilimanjaro Hippo Co-operative.’ (And so on.)
It’s a little difficult on the printed page to show how pleasurable the game is. It’s not so much what is said, but the expert’s eagerness to supply instant answers. The audience know that they’d hedge, and beat about the bush, and they have a great respect for a performer who doesn’t try any evasions. Sometimes such interviews are hysterically funny. It’s very good if the interviewer refers to ‘charts’ that he imagines on the wall, and asks the ‘expert’ to explain them, or if the activity can be demonstrated. If you’ve been teaching mushrooms to yodel, the interviewer can say, ‘I believe you’ve brought some of your soloists with you this evening.’ Anyone from the audience would hastily deny this. It’s so nice when the expert says ‘Yes’ and calls them in, or mimes taking them out of his pocket.
‘Verbal Chase’
Students can become better at playing ‘Experts’ if they play a ‘verbal chase’ game first.
For example: Suppose I say ‘Imagine a box.’ A student can predict that the next thing I will say is something like ‘What’s in it?’ Instead I say ‘Who put you in there?’ My father,’ he says, anticipating a further question like ‘Why did he put you there?’ Instead I say ‘What have you got in there with you?’. He replies ‘A toilet’. I don’t know what he anticipates now, but certainly not what I do say, which is ‘What’s written on the outside of the box?’ Ladies!’ he says, collapsing with laughter.
We all laugh, I suppose because of the implied homosexuality. If I were to point this out, then the student would feel the need to guard against me. Instead, I ignore the content, and concentrate on trying to jerk the answers out of the student as quickly as possible.
I say to another student: ‘You’re in a street. What street are you in?’
‘Main street.’
‘What’s the shop?’
‘A fishmonger’s.’
‘What does the fishmonger point at you?’
‘A pistol.’
‘Vinegar.’
Again everyone laughs and is very pleased. Answering such questions is easy. Asking them is very difficult, because you have to change the ‘set’ of the questions each time. Here’s a sequence recorded in connection with a TV show. I was working with a girl student I’d just met for the first time.
‘Where are you?’
‘Here!’
‘You’re not. Where are you?’
‘In a box.’
‘Who put you there?’
‘Mummy.’
‘She’s not really your mummy. Who is she?’
‘She’s my aunt.’
‘What’s her secret plan?’
‘To kill me.’
‘What with?’
‘A knife.’
‘She sticks the knife where?’
This question freaks her, because it’s so sexual.
‘In … in … in my stomach.’
‘She cuts it open and takes out a handful of papery …’
‘Boxes.’
‘On the boxes is written …?’
‘ “Help!” ’
‘Who wrote it?’
‘I did.’
‘Who’s in the box? Crawling out?’ ‘A spider.’
‘A spider marked …?’
‘ “YES”.’
The spider does what?’
‘It eats me.’
‘Inside the spider you meet?’
‘My father.’
‘Holding?’
‘A … a … a … elephant.’
‘By the …’
‘Tail.’
Everyone falls about with laughter, as if we’d been telling jokes, and they understand that some sort of sequence has come to an end. A student who becomes an expert questioner, that is, who becomes very ingenious at changing the ‘set’ of the questions, becomes a better improviser. Speed is important, so that the questions and answers are a little too fast for ‘normal’ thought.
Some questioners start doing all the work. For example:
‘You’re walking along a road.’
‘Yes.’
‘You meet a giant.’
‘Yes.’
‘You fall into a pool and are eaten by crocodiles.’
‘Yes.’
‘Er … er …’
This could be rephrased, and would then work.
‘You’re walking along—what?’
‘A road.’
‘A giant does what to you?’
‘Throws me into a pond.’
‘What do the crocodiles bite?’
The more ‘insane’ the questions, the better in jerking spontaneous answers from the ‘victim’.
‘Word at a Time’
If I ask someone to invent the first line of a short story, he’ll unconsciously rephrase the question. He’ll tense up, and probably say ‘I can’t think of one.’ He’ll really act as if he’s been asked for a good first line. Any first line is really as good as any other, but the student imagines that he’s being asked to think up dozens of first lines, then imagine the type of stories they might give rise to, and then assess the stories to find the best one. This is why he looks appalled and mumbles ‘… oh … dor … um …’
Even if I ask some people for the first word of a short story they’ll panic and claim that they ‘can’t think of cafe’, which is really amazing. The question baffles them because they can’t see how to use it to display their ‘originality’ … A word like ‘the’ or ‘once’ isn’t good enough for them.
If I ask one student for the first word of a story, and another for the second word, and another for the third word, and so on, then we could compose a story in this way:
‘There’ … ‘was’ … ‘a’ … ‘man’ … ‘who’ … ‘loved’ … ‘making’ … ‘people’ … ‘happy’.
One version of the game—which I still play occasionally—involved telling a story around a circle as quickly as possible. Sometimes we did it to a beat. Anyone who ‘blocked’ we threw out until only two people were left. You can make the game tougher by having each person who speaks point to the person who is to say the next word, there’s no way to anticipate when your turn will come.
Anyone who tries to control the future of the story can only succeed in ruining it. Every time you add a word, you know what word you would like to follow. Unless you can continually wipe your ideas out of your mind you’re paralysed. You can’t adapt to the words said by other people.
‘We … (went for a walk) …’
‘Are … (nice people) …’
‘Going … (to the circus) …’
‘Away … (for a holiday) …’
‘To … (the country) …’
‘Explore … (the Amazon) …’
‘A … (cave) …’
‘Giant!’
Once you say whatever comes to mind, then it’s as if the story is being told by some outside force. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there are cultures which use the method as a form of divination. The group learn that this method of storytelling won’t work unless they relax, stop worrying about being ‘obvious’ and remain attentive. I have played it in darkened rooms with the group lying on their backs with their heads at the centre of a circle. I remember at RADA we once pulled curtains over ourselves and lay there like a huge pudding. After the group has played the game with their eyes shut, get them to walk about and observe any perceptual changes. (Colours become brighter, people and spaces seem of a different size, focus is sharper.) Our normal thinking dulls perception, but the word-at-a-time game can shut some of the normal screening off. (It’s not a good game for German speakers because of the rules about verbs coming at the end!)
I divide students into groups of four and get them to compose ‘letters’ a word at a time. They all relax and one of the players writes the letter down. I was describing this technique to an Eng. Lit. graduate.
‘I don’t think I could ever learn such a game,’ she said
‘Try it,’ I said, and wrote ‘89’ at the top of a sheet of paper.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘The beginning of the address.’
‘I don’t know what to put.’
This intelligent girl was suffering. She was claiming to be ‘uncreative’ but was really just terrified she’d give something away.
‘You know how addresses start on letters.’
‘Well … all right. “The”.’
‘Elms’, I wrote.
‘89 The Elms can’t be an address.’
‘It’ll do.’
‘I can’t think of anything else. I’ve got a block.’
I wrote ‘block’ down. Then I wrote ‘Jan’.
‘March’ she said, looking helpful.
I put an oblique stroke between ‘Jan’ and ‘March’. She looked as if she was under great stress. She wanted to fail but didn’t know how to. She was afraid that the game might make her reveal secret things about herself.
‘Dear’, I wrote.
‘Henry’, she said after a long pause.
‘I.’
‘Hope.’
‘Mrs.’
‘I don’t know who to put.’
‘Any name. There isn’t any way to choose a name that’s wrong.’ ‘Exeter’, she said, and seemed suddenly to realise that the game could be fun. The completed ‘letter’ read like this:
89 The Elms Block
Jan/March
Dear Henry,
I hope Mrs Exeter has been behaving well. Mum hopes that you will take off your bra. You will not proceed to any other perversions. The Vicar says Mrs White is a cow. Do you allow Mrs White to help you go to the bathroom?
Yours sincerely,
Arthur
PS I hate you.
Not an inspired letter, but once she got over her initial resistance she became fascinated by the game, and played it many times.
Word-at-a-time letters usually go through four stages: (I) the letters are usually cautious or nonsensical and full of concealed sexual references; (2) the letters are obscene and psychotic; (3) they are full of religious feeling; (4) finally, they express vulnerability and loneliness.
Improvisations go through similar stages if you don’t censor them, and if you work with the same group day after day. Here is a sequence of ‘letters’ which were written late one night, by three drama students (two boys and a girl). They said it took them a couple of hours, what with talking, and opening more beers, and so on. I’d told them that the stories changed if they persisted in writing them, but I hadn’t told them what to expect. They stopped when they were too scared to write any more. You can see the ‘armour’ peeling off letter by letter. Some of the paragraphs have titles, which I think were arrived at by spelling them out a letter at a time.
1. ‘How did he walk on the water when it was raining? I don’t think that God exists (in garbage cans). Polacks began to fix their dynamite to the end of their tools which shuddered and vibrated radically. “John is a prick,” said Mary, “why can’t he fuck my arse, the bastard!” Jeremy and Fiona lay in a compromising position with green and yellow forceps plucking their pubic hair which rustled like reeds in a storm which was raging then. Tomorrow we must go with Jane to old mansions and buy all the paraphernalia required for our happy transactions in the nuptial bed. Why did Mary pull Jeremy’s trousers off his legs and burn with green fingers? She stroked his beard and began fondling his nosebag. It began to get warm in the greenhouse, plants wilted and detumesced. If the rain couldn’t get into the trough all the plants would die. How will Mother walk when it begins raining?’
2. ‘Because Mary felt ill, she went to the doctors. Did he feel reluctant to examine her? She couldn’t pass water and fart when asked. “You may leave the basin on the table if water is spilling down your legs.” I thought that we can perhaps catch ourselves in bed. Basins frighten ghosts and mice, but spiders walk around chairs and breathe softly. Can I hear myself breathe? Only God can produce Christ’s image on church walls without seeming to characterise. If water falls gently on to the spider it will die. Tomorrow is Christ’s birthday and we must celebrate with balloons and razors. Should we allow Christ to die? Perhaps he can save us, perhaps he can obliterate us. Fear is always present with me. God is dead. Big tits can make me feel happy, and saved. Mary and I are not related and can only marry if God permits. Why can’t we live by ourselves?’
3. ‘Purgation. Lightning strikes trees but only when it rains hard. Water runs along green branches carrying specks of bird-shit. Clouds follow the sun which shines only on holidays. Thunder is loud but soft in rain. Why can trees blow their leaves towards the houses? Why does rain trickle down my trees? I like rain when it splatters against my house and face. Should ghosts haunt my house? I would like it if God left me alone. Ghosts like butter, mice like ghosts, butter likes me. Poetry destroys all images and reincarnation. Why, why can’t I live without people and Jesus and poetry? If it destroys me it destroys everything. Bombs destroy people, God and me. Are bombs created by God or are poets Gods, or is love a bomb which destroys rain?’
4. ‘Autumn. He walked through the trees carrying a body which bumped gently against the ground, which was hard and frozen. She held his hand, softly whispering “Dead!” Can’t leaves drift under the bodies without breaking? Is Mother dying or has she died without screaming “Dead!” whispered Mary. He shook the leaves off Mother and began sprinkling dirt over her grave. After death will God see her face? Will Mother laugh at God or cry “Dead!”? Should we mourn her parting? Leaves tremble and fall swiftly. Time carries her scythe tenderly without cutting her throat. Leaves cut my heart, but Jesus cuts my mother. Between them their relationship seems brittle and lifeless like dead leaves.’
5. ‘Love lost. Sunshine brightens my life. Yesterday, today, tomorrow; all my loves have flown towards oblivion. Death approaches from lost loves. Is death the answer? Can Christ save lost lovers or do angels meet flying shadows under sunlit gardens? Black night frightens angels. Dark alleys frighten lovers. Only lovers know love and see nothing but sunshine. Perhaps death hides people from the heaven-sent sunshine, or love hides from death. When you travel through darkness, hold love tightly, for you will need all the strength of your love to be unafraid of death. Why should we not love again, though we may lose our lives from lost loves? Death cannot change us, or destroy us, while God loves lovers.’
6. ‘Shipwrecks are dangerous to people on ships. Waves cause shipwrecks and are beautiful. How can beautiful waves destroy people without turning ugly? Jesus walks: untroubled footsteps sound across vast oceans of beautiful waves. Shipwrecks begin when love disappears. Jesus hears no footsteps, only the screams of the dying waves which patter his feet. Why do mermaids not hear God? Is death inevitable? Do shipwrecks begin when ears are hearing nothing but footsteps? Can I hear waves beating on nothing? Only if I make footsteps heard. Christmas comes when God is deaf to our screams, and waves become destructive and silent like Jesus’s feet.’
7. ‘Sabbat. Seven dwarfs stood silently watching. Six leprechauns, being present at the funeral, began dancing. Five Jews scrabbled in mud for money which the angels took. Three dwarfs raped two leprechauns, who said that one was enough.’
8. ‘Hells I view. Black shines brightly under white silk curtains, light filters through black windows but fades colours anyway. Windows shine at people from afar. Darkness surrounds me as I gaze at people in the street. Is my body there or am I looking at it through dark windows?’
9. ‘Seagulls. Look at the seagulls circling above this place, like shadows falling at noon. Wings are made for flying higher and higher and swifter and stronger than anything crawling below. How do birds know what it is like to be earthbound? Perhaps they envy creatures who crawl and swim. If I could fly, like them, at the end of autumn where leaves lie brown and decaying, then I would know that God is a being who flies.’
10. ‘Snow is gentle and cold. It falls from above us. Death is only snow. It falls to cover our lives. But we cannot melt away death like sunshine melts snow. Coldness comes, only once the snow has fallen. If I can melt my snow will also melt, but because I am never fully warm I cannot live. Terror is cold. Fear is cold and only I can depend on heat. Love is warm. Ah! If only we had love always, we could conquer, and live forever. The people who love themselves cannot melt their snow. Only you can melt my snow, for our love can never fail, for however cold it becomes, we shall love each other and therefore melt each other’s snows and live forever.’
11. ‘Happiness is always transient. Perhaps we should try to be happier and better with our friends. Friendship is transient but transcience meets often with lasting friendship. Why can’t we meet other people and make friendships last? Am I ever going to meet my friends in honest friendship? Or will we ever see our own friendships die through lack of love? Which is the better? I don’t like to leave friends behind but friendship will come again. Love is permanent only when friendship and trust exists. If friendship is transient, trust must be the permanent basis of love.’
12. ‘Strings vibrate when they feel varying pressures upon them. Sounds echo through empty buildings. Light shines brightly, but only enters through open spaces in walls. My room vibrates silently and darkly. No light enters my room. It feels no emotion, like a static building where strings never vibrate. I cannot live alone, listening to silence and seeing nothing but walls and darkness. Why does light not enter my room? Must I feel deaf to vibrating strings and see nothing? Where am I, where are you? Where are the people who play music and vibrate strings? When will I hear and see music? I can’t tell. Only you can help me see and hear. I only live, hoping that you love me. Give me your hand, and take away my darkness and silence.’
13. ‘Summer roses die when winter strangles the ground. Weeds flourish when roses die. I lived in a thorn bush until roses began to die, then I left my thorn bush and ran towards the sun. I felt it warm my body as I had no clothes on. Approaching dusk saw me shiver, but I still ran towards the sun, and finally dropped towards the end of life. Roses covered my body. Dawn came and warmed the roses and me. Then at noon I burned. My body could not feel pain. I stood among the flourishing roses. They did not burn. Midnight came. I tried to return to my thorn bush but I was cold. If I cannot grow into a rose, I must die, and become a weed.’
14. ‘Walls encircle me. My heart has walls which surround my blood, beating steadily and relentlessly it pushes through my veins because I am so alive. Talk to me please. The walls are thin and crumbling. Life is being drained from within my body. Stop the current. I must break through the walls which hold my body. Death will soon release the aching heart, but I am not afraid. Here is my heart, now take a piece and smash down my walls.’
If you play this game with children, then it’s important not to insist on leading. Here’s a ‘story’ I improvised with a ‘disturbed’ nine-year-old boy. His words are in italics, and you can see how little I contributed.
‘A year ago strangely enough dead people strangled my mother. How did they do this? “Help!” cried Thing-a-me-boober, “I went over Heaven and Hell, where did you stop?” Hell is the ugliest place I have ever seen. Devil George swims through waves of flame to strengthen his bones. Mother screamed when she saw George holding a stick called a pitchfork. She fainted when my friend hit her over the head with a bucket of molten metal. Meanwhile, back in my own Casbah I got very drunk.’
A game can stare you in the face for years before you ‘see’ it. It wasn’t until I’d left the studio that I thought of asking students to act the stories out as they told them.
I get the actors to work in pairs, with their arms round each other, to say ‘We’ instead of ‘I’, and to use the present tense. I discourage them from putting in adjectives, or saying ‘But’. It’s normal for them to encounter something unpleasant, and to hold it off with adjectives by saying ‘We … met … a … big … huge … terrifying… angry … black … monster … but … we … escaped.’ Once they’ve mastered the basic technique of the game (which is very easy) then I forbid them to escape from the monsters. ‘Kill it or be killed,’ I say, ‘or make friends with it, outwit it.’ I remind them that there isn’t really a monster, so what does it matter if they allow themselves to be torn apart? If they get eaten or killed I say ‘Go on, don’t stop the game.’ Then they can fight their way out of the monster, or continue in heaven, or whatever. They can mime sitting astride enormous turds and paddle through the intestines. If they get to heaven they can find God is missing and take over the place, or arm-wrestle him, or anything.
The audience can hardly believe that it’s possible to improvise scenes in this way, and they’re delighted to see actors working in such sympathy. I used to ask the audience for titles first, and I usually combined two titles to make one; the actors would then improvise Dracula and the Bald Lighthouse Keeper, or Rin-Tin-Tin and the Fall of the Roman Empire.
Some people avoid getting involved in action. All they’ll produce is stories like ‘We-are-going-to-the-market-where-we-buy-bread-andnow-we-walk-to-the-beach-where-we-watch-the-seagulls …’ It’s a good idea to start such people off inside a womb, or on another planet, or being hunted for murder, or some other dramatic situation.
The game can be intensified by having one partner close his eyes, while the other partner stops him from bumping into the furniture. In another version both partners close their eyes, while the group stand round them and protect them. If the group is in a good state, that is to say warm and friendly, then they’ll begin to add things to the story. If a wind is mentioned the group will spontaneously make wind noises, or perhaps flap coats around them to make a draught. If the storytellers are in the forest, then bird sounds will be made, or rustlings. Soon the group begin to dictate parts of the action, providing encounters with animals or monsters. An extraordinary energy is released, an almost sinister excitement sweeps over the group, and all sorts of sensitivity exercises are discovered. The group will ‘fly’ the story tellers, and bury them in heaps of bodies or be ‘spiders’ crawling all over their skins.
It’s amazing to be one of the ‘storytellers’ because everything becomes so real for you. Once your eyes are shut, and you’re involved in the story, and people begin to supply even very approximate effects, the brain suddenly links it all up, and fills in the gaps. If someone touches your face with a wet leaf you hallucinate a whole forest, you know what kind of trees are there, the type of animals, and so on.
One extraordinary way to play word-at-a-time games is to ask a whole group to tell the story, all speaking together. I don’t know how to convince you that this is possible, but most groups can succeed at it, if you approach them at the right moment. Start with everyone pressed together, and say ‘Start with “We” and all speak at the same time.’ I suppose it works because many people say the same words, and the minority who go ‘wrong’ are swamped out by the majority.
4
‘Playwriting’
An improviser can study status transactions, and advancing, and ‘reincorporating’, and can learn to free-associate, and to generate narrative spontaneously, and yet still find it difficult to compose stories. This is really for aesthetic reasons, or conceptual reasons. He shouldn’t really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines.
If I say ‘Make up a story’, then most people are paralysed. If I say ‘describe a routine and then interrupt it’, people see no problem. A film like The Last Detail is based on the routine of two sailors travelling across America with a prisoner whom they have to deliver to a prison. The routine is interrupted by their decision to give him a good time. The story I fantasised earlier about the bear who chased me was presumably an interruption of the routine ‘Walking through the forest’. Red Riding Hood presents an interruption of the routine ‘Taking a basket of goodies to Grandma’.
Many people think of finding more interesting routines, which doesn’t solve the problem. It may be interesting to have a vet rectally examining an elephant, or to show brain surgeons doing a particularly delicate operation, but these activities remain routines. If two lavatory attendants break a routine by starting a brain operation, or if a window cleaner begins to examine the elephant, then this is likely to generate a narrative. Conversely, two brain surgeons working as lavatory cleaners immediately sounds like part of a story. If I describe mountaineers climbing a mountain, then the routine says that they first climb it, and then they climb down, which isn’t much of a story. A film of a mountain climb isn’t necessarily anything more than a documentary. If we interrupt the routine of mountain-climbing by having them discover a crashed plane, or if we snow them up and have them start eating each other, or whatever, then we begin storytelling. As a story progresses it begins to establish other routines and these in their turn have to be broken. In the story about the bear I escaped to an island and began making love to a beautiful girl. This can also be considered as a routine that it’s necessary to interrupt. I interrupted it with the bear, but I could have chosen one of an infinity of other ways. I could have found that she was wearing a wig to hide her complete baldness, or that I was impotent, or that my penis was growing so long that it had made its way to the shore of the lake where it was being attacked by the bear. I could have discovered that she was my sister—Maupassant set such a story in a brothel.
It doesn’t matter how stupidly you interrupt a routine, you will be automatically creating a narrative, and people will listen. The scene in The Tempest where Caliban hears the clown coming works marvellously, but it’s ludicrous. The first routine suggests that Caliban will defend himself, or leave. He crawls under a sheet. When the clown enters he sees this monster hiding under the sheet. If we treat this as a routine, then it’s obvious that the clown runs away. What he does is incredible—the very last thing anyone would do is to crawl under the sheet beside the monster. It’s actually the best thing to do, since it spectacularly breaks the routine.
We could introduce this concept by getting each actor in a scene to prearrange something that’ll surprise his partner. In a scene where a couple are about to go to bed, maybe the husband suddenly turns into a boot fetishist, or maybe the wife will suddenly start to laugh hysterically, or find she’s growing feathers. If you set out to do something in a scene that your partner can’t anticipate, you automatically generate a narrative.
Sometimes stories themselves become so predictable that they become routines. Nowadays if your princess kisses the frog, it’s probably better if she becomes a frog herself, or if the frog she kissed just becomes six feet higher. It’s no good the knight killing the dragon and deflowering the virgin any more. Killing the virgin and deflowering the dragon is more likely to hold the audience’s attention.
One way that storytellers wreck their talent is by cancelling. A student of mine wrote a scene in which a girl friend messed up her ex-boy friend’s apartment in an act of revenge. He arrived and they had a row. Once the row was over and she had left, the playwright had a sensation of ‘failure’, or having done nothing—which was true. When I told the writer to consider the row as a routine which needed to be broken, she wrote a scene in which at the height of the row the girl suddenly injected the ex-boy friend with a syringe, and locked herself in the bathroom. One moment there was a row going on, and the next the man was suddenly terrified of what she might have done to him.
Many students dry up at the moment they realise that the routine they’re describing is nearing its completion. They absolutely understand that a routine needs to be broken, or they wouldn’t feel so unimaginative. Their problem is that they haven’t realised what’s wrong consciously. Once they understand the concept of ‘interrupting routines’, then they aren’t stuck for ideas any more.
Another way that improvisers screw themselves up is by moving the action elsewhere. An improvisation starts with a girl asking a boy for the time. He says it’s four o’clock. She says that the others are late, and they begin talking about these imaginary others, and what happened last time, and the scene fizzles out. I tell them that they got diverted into a discussion of events that happened another time, and that there was nothing for the audience to see. I start them again with the opening dialogue. She asks what time it is. He says, ‘Four o’clock.’ I shout out: ‘Say it’s time to begin.’ It’s time to begin,’ he says. ‘Must we?’ she asks. He says, ‘Well you know how strict he is’, and again they begin talking about something outside the scene. I tell them I don’t care what they do so long as the action remains onstage. ‘Get a bucket,’ I say, and the actor mimes carrying on a bucket. ‘Is it really necessary?’ implores the actress. ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘open your mouth, I’ll put the funnel in.’ I’ve put on twenty pounds in the last week,’ she complains. ‘He likes them fat,’ he says, pouring the ‘contents’ of the ‘bucket’ into the ‘funnel’ while she pretends to be swelling up. The scene now seems inspired, and the audience are fascinated. (Speke found this scene in reality: a tribe where the king’s wives were forcibly fed, and sprawled about like great seals.)
One of the first games I used at the studio involved getting Actor A to order Actor B about: ‘Sit down. Stand up. Go to the wall. Yawn. Say “I’m tired.” Look around. Walk to the door …’ and so on. We weren’t trying to create narratives; we only wanted the actors to get used to obeying each other, and to ordering each other around. This game (if you can call it a game) exposed them to an ‘audience’ without their having to think about success or failure.
Now that I’m teaching ‘playwriting’ in a Canadian university, I’ve adapted this early game into a way of teaching narrative skills. Two students obey a third who tells them what to say and do. The third student, the ‘playwright’, will be under a certain amount of stress, but if he blocks I tell him to say ‘prompt’, and then someone tells him what to say next. We don’t play the game in order to get ‘good stories’, although ‘good stories’ may emerge; the important thing is to investigate exactly why the playwright ‘blocks’.
A playwright who gets his two students to wash up soon stops and says ‘I can’t think of anything.’ If I say ‘Break the routine’ he has one student break a plate on purpose. He now has a quarrel which he can develop for a while, but which is also a routine. They decide to put the plate together, and find a piece is missing. They investigate and find a hole in the floor. They peer through the hole and start talking about what they see underneath. The playwright then gets stuck again. What he’s done is to move the action offstage, so I tell him he’s been deflected, and that he’s to get the action onstage again. He tells them to tear up the floorboards, and the ‘block’ dissolves.
An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some sort of organised manner, but they want to see routines interrupted, and the action continuing between the actors. When a Greek messenger comes in with some ghastly story about events that have happened somewhere else, the important thing is the effect the revelation produces on the other characters. Otherwise it stops being theatre, and becomes ‘literature’.
A ‘playwright’ begins a story by saying: ‘Dennis, sit on the chair, and look ill. Betty, say “Are you feeling well?”. Dennis, say “No, could you get me a glass of water.” Betty, get Dennis a glass of water. Drink it, Dennis. Betty, say “How do you feel?”. Dennis, say “Much better now” . .’
At this point the ‘playwright’ becomes confused, so I stop him and explain that he’s cancelled everything out. He introduces the idea of sickness, and then he removes it. I take the story back to when Dennis drinks the glass of water. ‘Dennis, find that the water goes right through you, and is splashing on the floor under the chair. Betty, get him another glass of water. Dennis, examine yourself to try to work out what happened. Betty, give him the water, and put the glass under the chair to catch it when it runs through again. Dennis, say “Can you help me?”. Betty, say “You’ll have to take your clothes off, then.” Dennis, mime undressing …’ And so on. The level of invention is no higher, but the story is no longer being cancelled, and it holds the attention.
There’s nothing very profound about such stories, and they don’t require much imagination, but people are very happy to watch them. The rules are: (1) interrupt a routine; (2) keep the action onstage—don’t get diverted on to an action that has happened elsewhere, or at some other time; (3) don’t cancel the story.
5
I began this essay by saying that an improviser shouldn’t be concerned with content, because the content arrives automatically. This is true, and also not true. The best improvisers do, at some level, know what their work is about. They may have trouble expressing it to you, but they do understand the implications of what they are doing; and so do the audience.
I think of an improvisation we did years ago: Anthony Trent played being a prisoner in a cell. Lucy Fleming arrived, I don’t remember how, and he endowed her with invisibility. At first he was terrified, but she calmed him down, and said she had come to rescue him. She led him out of the prison and as he stepped free he fell dead. It had the same kind of effect as Ambrose Bierce’s story Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.
I remember Richardson Morgan playing a scene in which I said he was to be fired, and in which he said he was failing at his work because he had cancer. I think Ben Benison was the boss and he treated Ric with amazing harshness. It was about the cruellest scene I’ve ever seen and the audience were hysterical with laughter. I’ve never heard people laugh more. The actors seemed to be dragging all the audience’s greatest fears into the open, laying out all their insecurities, and the anxiety was releasing itself in waves of roaring, tearing laughter, and the actors absolutely knew what they were doing, and just how slowly to turn the screw.
You have to trick students into believing that content isn’t important and that it looks after itself, or they never get anywhere. It’s the same kind of trick you use when you tell them that they are not their imaginations, that their imaginations have nothing to do with them, and that they’re in no way responsible for what their ‘mind’ gives them. In the end they learn how to abandon control while at the same time they exercise control. They begin to understand that everything is just a shell. You have to misdirect people to absolve them of responsibility. Then, much later, they become strong enough to resume the responsibility themselves. By that time they have a more truthful concept of what they are.