Transcript:
Lee Simpson Chats with Ben Yeoh on Improvisation, the Future of the Arts and Theatre Directing
Ben Yeoh (00:00): Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats, my Podcast. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. What does Improvisation tell us about being human? In this episode, I speak to Lee Simpson. One of the foremost Improv practitioners in the world. We'll discuss the languages and principles of Improv, the world of Theatre Directing and what it might mean to ‘Build Back Better’ for the Arts. If you appreciate the show, please like, and subscribe, as it helps others find the podcast. Enjoy!
Hey everyone! I'm super excited to be speaking to Lee Simpson today. He's a long time Comedy Store player. He’s also the Co-Artistic Director of Improbable Theatre. So, Lee, I think in your life's work, you have had kind of two broad strands as I've seen in it from the outside. You've had a kind of Improv strand and a Theatre Directing strand. How have those two strands kind of built together and how do you kind of see them at the moment?
Lee Simpson (01:17): I guess they're built together because they grew from each other or one grew from the other. So way back, in the last century, almost in the middle of the last century when I was at school. I did school plays. Our English teacher who directed the school plays found a book called Improv by Keith Johnston. I think pretty much as it came out in 1979. He read it. He changed his life and he set about changing ours. So we started doing these exercises from his book. Therefore, in that sense, that kind of interest, just as someone doing school plays, grew into an interest in Improvisation. Then later on once I'd been through Drama School. I met Phelim, Phelim McDermott, the other Co-Artistic Director of Improbable. I met him because he'd been on a workshop with Keith Johnston down in Dorset. The people who'd been on the workshop in Dorset wanted to carry on the work, but they needed some people who'd done a bit of improv as we used to call it. We call it Improv now because that's what the Americans call it.
Yeah. We have to do what the Americans say in the end. You know, we hold out for a bit. Yeah, they wanted to do some shows at the Tricycle Theatre. Phelim was part of that group, but I was drafted in as someone who had actually done a few Improv gigs in London, in the mid-eighties, and that's where Phelim and I met and then from meeting in a kind of Improv setting Phelim and then asked me to make some shows with him. From that moment, really the two things coexisted for both myself and Phelim.
Ben Yeoh (03:17): Wow. I hadn't understood that the two are intersectional from such an early stage that brings two questions to mind. One was going to Drama school in the first place, was that partly inspired by the teacher who was inspired and suggested going down that route? Then I wonder at Drama school, did they teach much Improv as it was probably known at the time? Because I had the sense that actually Drama schools were going slightly down this other strand, the kind of Theatre strand. That's one of the differences I was interested in between the kind of Improv schools where Keith's book still seems to be actually foundational after all of this time, rather than a particular school or centre.
Lee Simpson (04:07): Yeah. I mean, the reason why I had gone to Drama school, the teacher at my school, his name was Bob Hewitt. He really inspired me. He lit the fire around Theatre and Improvisation. So I'll be an actor then. Cause that's what you did. I'll be an actor. So, but I was living in a little village called Bradwell within Norfolk, which is nowhere. So I thought, well, I need to, how do I get myself to London? That I felt the neatest way to get myself to London was to go to a Drama school. I wasn't necessarily looking for training. I was looking for a geographical shift. So I applied to Drama schools did a couple of years and eventually got accepted into one. So that's kind of how the Drama School thing happened. The school I went to was a place called Webber Douglas Academy for the Dramatic Arts. We used to call it the Douglas Bader Academy for Dramatic Arts. I'm not sure why. A silly joke but we did. They thought of themselves as giving classical training. So I'm very antique Improv in lots of ways. They were supposed to turn out sort of RSC ready actors. Remember, this is the early eighties. At that school, there was a visiting teacher who wasn't really a member of staff but would come and teach stuff called Andy Harmon. He was an American who’d studied with Paul Sills who was Viola Spolin’s son. I think he had studied with Viola that as well. So Viola Spolin is the godmother of Improvisation. So we have these two parents. The American, which is Viola and Keith, the British. They are different. They do come from different places. Viola's work grew out of Theatre games that she played with immigrant children in Chicago, in the twenties, to promote their kind of social skills and the issues that they were having, being in a strange country. So she was very interested in that sort of thing. Therefore, her Improvisation methods grew out of that, whereas Keith's was a Royal Court Writers' Group that whole story. So, it's kind of different to clearly talk about the same thing, clearly interested in the same things, just arriving at it from slightly different groups. Anyway, Andy Harmon used to come and teach at the trauma school and he would be given the problem groups.
So the groups who were a bit rubbish as far as the Drama school was concerned. I was in a problem group, and I think I was probably a problem in the problem group. So we were given Andy Harmon. So Andy Harmon did some very different Improvisation and the Improvisation that I'd done up to that point, which had been basically from Keith's book. So that was fantastic! That totally broadened what I thought Improvisation was and what it could be. This gave me a whole set of other things, which hooked me up with Andy. Andy was the first person to give me a gig in London once I'd left Drama school. So Andy was seen very much as an alien in that environment. That was an environment that was very much about the classical tray, meaning the classical actor, voice, speech, elocution, physicality, all of those things we're taught in a very, very, I guess, old fashioned way. For instance, talk like this, hold your body like this, breathe like this. They taught you how to breathe, breathe like this, speak verse like this. We had makeup classes. do makeup like this. So it was that. Then there was this kind of rogue element, which was Andy and the Improv. That was obviously the thing that I was most excited by.
Ben Yeoh (08:06): Going back to the eighties, just thinking about it was the work of Boal also there and interesting for that type of games or community and thinking? Or had it not really infiltrated Drama schools by that time?
Lee Simpson (08:22): I can't imagine that Boal and certainly hadn't infiltrated Webber Douglas at that time, it hadn't been, I wasn't aware of his work at all. It was only much later that I became aware of his work. So, no. There was no Boal. There was no Grotowski. There was no Brooke. There was a kind of passing acknowledgement that these people existed, but it was all ridiculous. I mean, our Acting Coach spent pretty much an entire lesson telling us why Improvisation was impossible.
Ben Yeoh (09:00): Well, that's great. Although, I guess you always kind of want to prove your teachers wrong to some extent, so maybe that's quite a good impetus. I guess if you sort of fast-forward to today, I still think the worlds of Improv and say a more Classical Theatre tradition, even if it has been more infiltrated by Brooke and Boal and the others still seem quite far apart. Is that your observation as well? Do you think it goes to the slight roots of where classical Theatre people kind of either don't do Improv or think it's for games and playing and a serious exploration of the nature of language and the nature of what it means to be human rather than those types of things?
Lee Simpson (09:43): Yeah, I think that's fair enough. I think there is a gap. Wow, what would you call it? I don't know. There is a polarization there and a lack of respect. I think on both sides and a lack of a sense that the other side is not really worth very much. I think that's certainly true that Theatre trivializes Improv or Improvisation and sees it as not particularly serious or worthwhile. But then the Improv world is one that presents itself very often as trivial and not worthwhile. We have a massively long and sort of valued history of Theatre as a kind of subdivision of Literature in this country. Theatre is where people read plays as part of their Literature Studies. So the reverence given to the written word it's incredibly high in British Theatre tradition, much higher is my guess than in other world Theatre traditions. So there's the idea of letting go of that written word is harder, I think. In terms of the tradition of Theatre in this country, I mean, when we were doing, we started by talking about the eighties, when we were doing Improvisation in the eighties lots of Theatre, people were just angry at us and they would say, what do you think you don't need writers? So they thought we were a kind of a movement trying to get rid of writers from Theatre.
Ben Yeoh (11:47): …No playwright, because it's cheaper to do.
Lee Simpson (11:51): Well, yeah. They thought we were disrespecting writing. Yeah. We thought we would, that we were saying, well, you need to, who needs a play? Who needs a playwright? You know, playwrights don't need them. Of course, that was absolute. There was nothing to do with what we, and the other, the other approach was that people assumed that you'd worked out beforehand. So they said, "Oh, you've definitely worked that out before". So basically it was to two outcomes. If it went well, they said, “Oh, you must've worked that out beforehand”. If you said, no, we didn't, they didn't believe you. Or if it went badly, they went, “Well, what do you expect is Improvised”?
Ben Yeoh (12:31): You need to write, don’t you?
Lee Simpson (12:32): You need to write, don’t you? Yeah. So there's a real catch 22 around the whole thing, right through the early to mid-eighties.
Ben Yeoh (12:40): I guess Improv probably doesn't help itself because it pokes fun at everything. I guess so many things, it would poke fun at Theatre. So they would give an impression of it not being serious. I guess the impression is that Improv is about being funny and humour and comedy. I sense, particularly if you go back to the work of Keith or from the American tradition, it seems to be many other things. In fact, humour is perhaps one smaller part, although that's the part that people see. Do you think the language of Improv actually does stretch much wider? I think as an area that perhaps you've been exploring over the last 10, 20, 30 years, and what have you discovered or reflecting on the language of Improv now?
Lee (13:32): Yeah, of course. Yeah. The breadth of expression that's possible with Improvisation is just as it might be for Theatre or any other Art form. I think that's pretty self-evident. However, Improv has, it's very complex because there's an economic situation. So for Theatre, whether it's subsidized or non-subsidized, there is an infrastructure that supports it for its production. However, weak or under threat that may be perceived to be that infrastructure is there. There is a pathway for that to happen. So it happens and there is an infrastructure to support work, Theatre work, traditional Theatre work of all sorts. There is a kind of pathway for that to happen. For Improvisation, that hasn't existed. Maybe only just about is starting to exist, but that really hasn't existed. So it's hard to feed itself if you like, it's hard to create its own world and its own infrastructure and its own support system. Now doing that in this economic structure that we have. This means creating stuff that's going to be immediately appealing to people who are going to give you enough money to do another thing. So the Improvisation, although it didn't begin as comedy at all, or as Keith calls it light entertainment. That's what Keith says. Most Improvisations, light entertainment. It didn't begin like this at all, but to survive, to get people in, to sell itself very often, Improvisation has presented itself and become light entertainment.
So structures and infrastructures that support Improvisation or Improv have light entertainment started to grow and start to build up. Now, there are some that exist. Now there's an Artistic, I think there's an Artistic reason why Improv tends towards comedy or license entertainment. This is one that Keith identified very early on, which is that Improvisation is very much about a feedback loop with the audience. So the performer does something for the audience, has a response, which the performer perceives, which informs the next thing the performer does, which does it into a response to which the audience space, which the performer perceives and so on and so on. So the feedback loops are happening, not just between the players on the stage, but they're happening between the performer and the audience. That's very, very important in Improvisation. I think it's very important in Theatre, but that's a whole other discussion. Now the most tangible audience feedback is laughter because you can hear it. People either laugh or they don't. Therefore, what happens or what has happened and what happens is performers noticed the tangible response and then that trained them to do the next thing, to get the tangible response. So this feedback loop started to train Improvisers into being funny. Keith talks about performance being trained by the audience to be funny. He speculates about what it would be like if you could actually hear the sound of the hairs on people's arms standing on end, or you could hear the sound of people being engrossed in some way. You don't hear those things. The messages that the audience sends you, that’s what's happening to them, which is much less tangible. It is much harder to perceive and very often to perceive them, you have to almost dream them. You almost have to kind of sense them. So, audiences have trained Improvisers to be funny. Therefore, I think, there's an economic kind of structural part of that story. Then there's a kind of Artistic part of that story. What that means is if you want to expand or re-expand the palate of Improvisation, then you've got to do some stuff to support that, to keep that going. Otherwise, it just disappears, it kind of gets squished. Therefore, I guess that the work that Phelim and I and lots of other people have done is around that. It is around finding ways to hear other responses from the audience, to hear other responses from your fellow players, to hear other responses from the world and to support people, to be on stage and stay awake and listen to all their impulses, not just the impulses, which are around being funny.
Ben Yeoh (19:04): That makes a lot of sense to me, that sort of financial imperative or catalyst that structural underlay, and then that Artistic one with the feedback loop. I was speaking to a games philosopher recently, and he spoke about a term that he considers Process Art. That actually a lot of Art is in the process or in that feedback loop. Actually, that's where it's created. And to be kind of quite aware of that in any of these well, he was talking about games playing on that type of thing, but we extended it to anything where you have that audience-performer, because actually as we know a performer without an audience, isn't the complete work of Art. Therefore, we know something happens in that interaction. I know I was reflecting on that, although there is now perhaps a little bit of infrastructure for comedy or light entertainment, as Keith might say, it strikes me as there are no real great Improv schools in the UK or schools or universities or Drama schools, which you think of as Improv. I guess in Europe, we think of Jacques Lecoq a little bit in that tradition, but probably there seem to be fewer even in Europe. Do you think that's just that economic imperative that you spoke about and therefore, would it be a great idea to have actually at least a centre where people could learn Improv and maybe also learn comedy? Although I, there seem to be two separate schools, I think, although they viewed it slightly differently. I think the Greeks taught comedy as a separate Art. So you would have had a school for it, or at least if you had a school of Drama, you'd have what would we call it nowadays - A tragedy track, a comedy track or whatever would be. So, yeah, reflecting on, should we have an Improv school in the UK? What, what should it do? Should we maybe have a comedy school? Is it just the economic imperative or I guess you hinted at that tradition of the written word being so important to the Classical English Theatre that perhaps it's just not allowed the space to grow something which is from so much more of an oral or physical Theatre tradition.
Lee Simpson (21:27): There are people who are beginning that process. So there's an organization called Hoopla. There's also one called Free Association. There's The Nursery and there's now one called The Improv Space. So the first three, Hoopla, Free Association and Nursery are actual spaces or buildings. Then the Improv place is an online space. What they've done is, they've adopted essentially the American Model in terms of Improvisation and the American Model in terms of financing and Improvisation organization is workshops and teaching. So you have a part of the organization, which is about performance and performing, and there's a Theatre. But the main income is from people learning about Improvisation, which becomes the main income because the majority of people taking those classes are not professional performers. So it becomes a thing that people do either professional development, personal development, or just because it's fun. This is a long-standing model in the States. So, and things like Bay Area Theatre, Sports, these are multi-million dollar organizations. Some of them like The Groundlings in LA. They have a real kind of structured workshops and courses that you take one after the other. That's how they survive. That's a reality now there's obviously this is a corporate arm to all of that, but I think the basic structure is kind of borrowed from the States. So in a smaller way, they are like Improv Drama schools. They kind of are presenting a series of courses, a curriculum and a set of teachers that can take people through from absolute beginner to someone who's on stage performing. Maybe they will grow. Maybe they will grow into bigger organizations, maybe have a grant to organizations, which have links to actual Drama schools. I don't know when we want to mark the beginning of the Theatre in the UK, whether it's the mystery plays or the pre-Shakespeare. But if that's whatever, five or 600 years of Theatre, I'm not sure when Drama schools appeared, but probably a hundred years ago. I don't know when Drama started or anything. So we went for a long time without any if we mark the beginning of Improvisation, as we understand it in the UK from 1956 then that's what it was 60 odd years old, 65 years old.
So that's kind of happening already, I think. There is a certain amount. They each have their styles. They each have their own kind of worldview. The Free Association is very American and that's what they say. They say they present an American style training, whereas The Nursery and Hoopla, don't necessarily quite as much. The Improv Place, I'm not as familiar with because it's a little bit newer, but it's an online space that was actually planned before the Pandemic, Katy Schutte and Chris Mead kind of went, “Oh, there's a gap in the market here for some online Improv training”. Then the Pandemic happened. They would have grown up, we've got a deck, we'd better do this then. So that sense and at what those places have done, which I think is absolutely brilliant is they, they engender a sense of community in terms of Improvisation that places for people to learn and perform, but also for places to be able to hang out and for audiences to hang out. I think they are very loyal, I mean, who knows what it's going to be like once we come back from Pandemic and all of that, but certainly pre-Pandemic. I was so struck by the sense of community that you got in those spaces, both with performers and the audience. I thought they were just brilliant! They were wonderful, wonderful spaces. The people running them clearly love Improv so much. It's something that they're all set up by people of a younger generation to me, is something that my generation of Improvisers never did. That's what this younger generation of Improvisers have done. I think it's absolutely fantastic.
Ben Yeoh (26:39): So if funding wasn't an issue and you would say the Director of the next Improv school, what would you perhaps investigate or do differently?
Lee Simpson (26:56): I think it would be Improbable. It would be, what would Improbable do? What would Improbable teach? How would Improbable approach that? So it would, essentially , be a school or training that was around and didn't look very similar. I think we might create a device piece of Theatre or rehearse a scripted piece of Theatre. So it would just gather together all the stuff that I think we've happened upon and been excited by over the years and the things that we continue to be excited by and continue to happen upon. I think that probably if I was going to, I would say that we'd be looking to create Improvised Theatre rather than Improv. I have to really stress. I'm totally fine with light entertainment. I love light entertainment. I love Comedy. I think Light Entertainment and Comedy are noble pursuits. I've paid my rent. The Comedy Store Players have paid my rent for the best part of 30 odd years. So I know I'm no one to kind of chuck mud on Comedy or Light entertainment. This is not just because it's paying my rent. I think they are absolutely noble pursuits and there's a dignity and a beauty and integrity to Comedy and light entertainment. I think, what can I say, the lack of respect that those disciplines or those parts of Theatre or performance are shown is somewhat classist in my view.
Ben Yeoh (29:01): I think I'd agree. I think Comedy if you think about its ability to change the minds of people, what a good joke does or something, which isn't really a joke, but plays through any extreme ism, or the way that it pokes fun at really anyone, right? There are all of these things. The way it can do it through all of these different devices, whether that's the story, inversion, repetition twist and all of that. I think that's why it's interesting. You can go back to Greek times, at least in the Western Tradition and see how important it is. It is that, and I think there is something about let's call them Populist Arts, which haven't broken through, which I think is in this country classist or something is I haven't quite figured it out. So I want to maybe dwell a little bit on your Improbable work as well, aware of intersex, but just the last couple of bits on Improv. I was reflecting on your comments on the deep language of Improv. I was thinking that actually, it does seem at first glance to be a riff on some potentially deep human processes. I was thinking of just two quite simple ones about how good Improv often uses repetition or repetition, and then a twist and say metaphor and story. You go back to simply, let's look at the WritingTradition where they use repetition and repetition and a twist certainly is a technique for that. Then you go forward in life and actually repetition, or whether it's a power three or something is something which seems to be very deeply universal amongst humans. Then that repetition and a twist aspect seem to occur everywhere. I don't know whether that's, because I now see that as the pattern or the pattern is reflecting me. I'm not sure. I remember seeing many, many years ago, maybe 20 odd years ago, a group sort of showing this reputation.
That's someone, I think it was a kind of clown figure, essentially walking into a wall and just repeating that. The first time, wasn't that funny near the second time, by the fifth time you had this kind of tragic-comedy thing, because you knew what was happening, uh, by the eighth time, it was hilarious. Then something like the 11th time, there was a twist because it didn't repeat. So your expectations were all broken, which was even more super hilarious. That's really stuck with me because it just seems that there is some deep process going on there. So I'd be interested in any reflections that you have on what techniques or things you've learned from Improv, all this listening and the feedback loop. I was hearing what you said about audiences, and I think audiences know the laughter thing, but we also know the deep silence. That's the other second bit you hear in the Theatre all the time that you're going to think and performance can really play with. Because you can hear the silence because of that deep absence of noise. That seems to be another one, but you must have had sort of several others or maybe some parallels that you've reflected on in your thinking that you'd want to share.
Lee Simpson (32:29): I think in terms of repetition and twist or whatever version of that pattern and structure and story. I mean, patterns slash structure slash story. It seems to me that we, human beings, kind of think in story form. We don't think about data. We don't think in statistics. We think in story form. We hire and fire and vote. We interact and relate and judge in story form. A story is the placing of events in a sequence that seems to be, that seems to make what we would call a story. Now I don't think there were several stories. I think there is an infinite number. But our perception, our sense of what structure does to us is I think physiological. It does something to us. I think we each have our little preferences if you like, we each respond to different structures in different ways, but definitely, that structure is there. Now, when people write, that's sometimes what's lacking. Sometimes that's the last thing that people learn. I think when they're writing, it is that structure and I think there's sometimes the last thing that people learn when they're Improvising as well. What's interesting. I think about Improvisation in that conversation is that structure is sort of more important, but it's not predetermined, not always. In some improvisations, the structure is predetermined, which is fair enough. However, if it's not predetermined, you're then looking at well, what is the structure that is emerging? Is it repetition? Is the game another way of saying it is what's the game, it's the game of this scene that I'm going to do the same thing over and over again? And when does that change? Or I think Keith's great, great, great breakthrough was to say, "Well, let's look at status interaction". That then becomes a language to talk about structure. That then becomes a language through which to describe human interaction.
So someone starts high status, someone starts low status. Then during the scene, they swap status that's structure. That's a story. We know it’s a story. We know when that transaction is complete, we know there's a kind of ending or at least a punctuation point. So I think structure and that idea of repetition change and absolutely Comedy absolutely has to have a real awareness of that. Even if you're going to have what you would call no structure, then that's a structureexists. An awareness of it is incredibly important and is incredibly important for Improvisation because that's what stories are. In the end, whether you're telling a joke or whether you're doing a sketch or whether you're writing a novel or you're making a film, or you're doing a Theatre. You're telling a story in some sense. Phelim and I back in the old days we would, when we were trying to talk to people about what we do, we say essentially we're storytellers. That can be kind of almost anything I think. I don't know, I've forgotten the second part of your question. That was about structure.
Ben Yeoh (36:26): Yeah. I guess it was any parallels with that deep, deep structural language with other parts of life. But you've touched on that with the fact that his notion of storytelling patterns and that's stories or the way that humans understand the world, I think is what you were suggesting.
Lee Simpson (36:44): Absolutely. Yeah. We, we, we see our own, you know, we see our own lives as a story. It's hard to see your own life as a story because you're in it. We did a show called life game with Improbable, which was Keith format. In that, you bring someone on stage and you interview them about their life. Very simple questions about their life. Tell me about your father. Tell me about your mother. What's the first thing you remember, tell me about your first day of school or whatever. Then as they answer, you have people on the other side of the stage who are all Improvisers and when you hear something, you think, “Oh, let's dramatize that!” You use either a game or a scene in order to get people to play or to Improvise the story that we've just heard and you get the guests involved in various ways. What's interesting is that the events which are further from where they are now or the events when they were young or them getting older and older, depending on how old they are, tell us stories. Whereas if you talk about events, which are much closer to where they are now, in terms of time or events that have happened to now, they haven't quite turned those things into stories yet. They're much harder for those people to talk about. This makes it much harder to dramatize or to Improvise. So early on we had a kind of rule. We said, no one under 30 because there's not enough gap. They’re still in it. You know, they're talking about their teenage years and if they're 26, that kind of stuff in it. I don't think we would do that. Now. I think we got better at the process. Then we got better, you know, turning these things into stories, but that was the beginning.
So I think we do that to us, but we certainly do it with other people. We can see it happening when someone dies, whether that's someone we know or a famous person at the moment of his/her death, it's a story. It becomes a story with that. We feel in a position to evaluate or tell a story because there's an ending. I think that's true on the micro and the macro level. So anything that helps us to understand stories. I think with Improvisation, what's interesting is that you're not thinking about the story and then writing it down or organizing it. You have to understand what it feels like. So I'm in this scene or I'm in this show, what is this thing I'm feeling? What does that mean about what bit of the story we are in, what part of the structure are we in right now? You have to feel it in your body rather than analyze it as an intellectual. I think there's something really valuable in that. I'm not quite sure what it is entirely yet, but I think there has to be something really valuable about that ability or that facility or that opportunity.
Ben Yeoh (40:02): I hadn't heard that expressed that way. That's really resonating with me how you view your own life or others' lives, particularly through the length of time. We make it into a myth -- into a story -- in order to understand ourselves and whatever happened. When it's very close, I think we're seeing this with the Pandemic. We're still living it. We definitely are still living it! So we find it very hard to understand. I'm also reflecting that you're amongst the sort of handful of artistes who have a very long history with other handfuls of artistes. On the one hand, Improv and Theatre are quite ephemeral or in the moment. It lives as its thing. Then if you didn't see it, we recorded it. But the live audience is probably it's sort of clinical form. Yet because of your Comedy store players. The fact that you've done Improv with the same group of people is coming in and out over a very long distance of time. That must somehow change the language that you can speak to one another because although you might not start with a pre-determined structure, you've travelled so many of these pauses before you probably somehow left signposts for one another. You know, "Oh, I've teed this up and Paul will always do this. Or Lee will always do that when I do this". I don't know. I'm interested in that almost as a process of Art form because that's one, which has happened over time. I actually think perhaps due to its rarity or perhaps due to its richness, that is one of the things which draws audiences and communities. It draws these loyal audiences to it because it's a way of us understanding the world and seeing it with this group of people who are telling these kinds of stories now. I guess, through the language of their Improv. Also, we've seen them tell it through time, which just seems to me deeply fascinating and a really important practice. Do you view it as that? Or have I just kind of made this up and it's like a nice thing to look at. Or it's like, "No we just, go on stage and tell jokes".
Lee Simpson (42:17): I think both are true. I think both are true. We just go on stage and tell jokes. At the same time, you can view it as a kind of durational piece. You can say, "Okay, a group of people are going to meet once or twice a week and do a comedy show for two hours. They're going to do that for 30 years".
Ben Yeoh (42:38): I mean, that's outlasted it, friendships, marriages, you know?
Lee Simpson (42:41): Yeah.
Ben Yeoh (42:42): So many deaths, births, political figures and all of this, right?
Lee Simpson (42:47): Absolutely. Yeah. It becomes a piece of Art in and of itself, I think. The stories that kind of come off of that. It becomes a parallel. It becomes a story. That's what happens. It becomes a story in it. Who knows when that story, you know? The Pandemic might finish that story. That might be, the end of that story. Who knows, what I think about? We were doing a show just after the Twin Towers came down. We were doing a show just after Diana died. We were doing a show when the terrorists came in in 2010. We were doing a show when the Blair Government came in in '97. That kind of key moments or those standout moments or headline moments. If you like feed into that. We were with an audience through all of that. We were with an audience through all those events and all those years. Extraordinary things have happened, extraordinary. I don't know why, it's coming into my head. So I'm doing it. I'll do an anecdote FSA. That's okay. This is a long time ago. We were doing a show and someone said, “Mo Mowlam is in the audience”. No, no, they didn't. No. I'm telling you, I'm telling you the story all wrong. We were doing a show and it was the news and the tabloids that said that Mo Mowlam had admitted to smoking marijuana. It was probably because Bill Clinton was around and he was denying it or saying he didn't inhale. Everyone was doing jokes about Bill Clinton, not inhaling or whatever. So, we're doing the show and it was Jim Sweeney, I think. This was in the news and he ended up doing some stuff about Mo Mowlam smoking marijuana. It worked. It went down very well. Then, at the end of the show when we went back in. Then someone commented, "I think Mo Mowlam is in the audience". We went, "No! Oh my God! Oh, sh*t! Then they said, well, and then when we went back out. Sure enough, she was in the audience. So we've been doing these jokes about Mo Mowlam smoking weed. She was in the audience. Then after the show, someone had said, "Mo Mowlam would like to come and say, hello". We went, 'Yeah. Oh, sh*t! What is she going to say? Then she came in and she couldn't have been lovelier. We said, "We're sorry about the jokes". She said, "No. That's fine. You know, people doing worse stuff than that". We said, "What are you doing here?" She was the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at the time or whatever it was she was doing.
Lee Simpson (45:47): We said, "What are you doing here?" She said, "Oh, me and John", her husband, "were stuck at home. There was nothing on the tele". She said, " Oh, f**k! Let's go to the Comedy Store", which is how she spoke. So she came to the Comedy Store and that stArted a friendship between us and her. She then became our first president. It's not that well known, but Mo Mowlam was the first president of the Comedy Store Players.
Ben Yeoh (47:08): Wow.
Lee Simpson (47:15): She would invite us to the kind of apArtment that she had in White Hall. She would have evenings where she would cook a load of sausages in the oven and have several packets of Mother's Pride Bread and some butter. That was the food and you were to make yourself sausage sandwiches.
Lee Simpson (47:37): We had a kind of close relationship with her. She took us around parliament and into Number 10 and all this stuff. We felt very close to her. Then she got sick. She would talk to us about what they were doing. She would talk to us about how members of the Blair Government were spinning against her while she was being edged out. Before she died, they might not have said it, but she was edged out. She was sidelined. One could speculate about why that is but she was kind of sidelined, after all her work on the Good Friday Agreement. I think the last time we saw her, she was really cross because they'd been spinning, that she'd lost her marbles. That the brain tumour had meant that she was not with it anymore. She was telling us this. Then she died and it was really very affecting because she was such a loved figure. She took us around Parliament. Then she took us to 10 Downing Street. She walked from Parliament to 10 Downing Street and the people would stop her every five yards because they loved her. That wow, that connection that she had with people was so strong. People related to her because she was honest and she had integrity. I mean, I remember we were walking out of Parliament. This has nothing to do with the story. Sorry. This has nothing to do with it.
Ben Yeoh (49:28): No, it is. It's the relationships along with stories that these things build. So please go on.
Lee Simpson (49:35): We were walking out of Parliament and I was walking beside her and she said, "I've had enough of this place". I said, "Why? You know, people love you. You're great. You're doing great work. We need people like", whatever I said, I can't remember. She said, "No. I've had enough of this place. This place", she sort of pointed at the House of Commons that, "it doesn't matter anymore". What she was talking about was the shift of power from the Commons to the control of Executive power by the Prime Minister, by the Cabinet and that the House of Commons was being sidelined. She hated that idea. She thought that was anti-democratic. That was a process that she saw beginning with Blair and that government. Additionally, it's a process that we've watched happening since then, to the point now, where we have the basic government by edict. Where whatever you want to say, contracts for PPE or nothing. No trade deals are put before the Commons.
Ben Yeoh (50:53): Yeah. This government can essentially do whatever it wants to do, it can do. So I think that's kind of a really interesting segue to a lot of industries, but particularly the Arts have this idea of let's build back better. This is the kind of phrase I'm hearing, and I'm seeing it in Theatre and Artistic communities. But it strikes me, this is going to be very difficult without much money. We've actually less money than it's ever had before. It also strikes me as very difficult because other very worthy sectors, Education and Health also need to build or want to build back better. It also strikes me as Artistic organizations haven't maybe changed that much over time. If you're a young person wanting to get into this, it's harder than ever before with money and all of that. So I'd be interested, where you think maybe, as a sort of sector we could possibly build back better? Or not or whether the challenges are going to be we'll do really well if we can survive. Then perhaps you could reflect on where you think Improbable or your own work might be taking us to? I mean being part of building back better. Although again, when I look at individual organizations, I think they're going to be lucky just to rebuild back some work and be relevant that actually to build back better is already a hurdle, which we didn't really achieve pre-Pandemic. We didn't achieve it when we had a lot more money. Now you're saying it because of this, we have less money or not. It's interesting.
Obviously, that ideal has always been around. In addition, I think Arts incredibly undervalued as in all of these things. We've touched on some of the reasons: money, class, where we see the value, business and all of this. I think it is true, but that doesn't change the fact that all of those factors are still true. Now, if anything, in a stronger fashion. So, I'd be interested in inflexions. Do you think we can build better? Are there one or two things you'd like to see? Any work that you or Improbable, you are thinking of doing? Or you'd like to do more of it? And just where we are now? Because I think we can see light at the end of the tunnel, at least for the Pandemic and at least for the UK, but it seems to have concentrated all the problems that we had between equality between class, between inter and intra and all of this.
Lee Simpson (53:33): I think the ‘Build Back Better’ thing is a symptom of something that was happening anyway, which is a kind of Polaroid. Not a kind of polarization, a polarization around people who genuinely want to create something that's fairer and more equitable and people who don't and either are not interested in that or actively don't want to do that. For me, it's part of the breakdown of consensus. One, whether it was an apparition or not one as a sense of mid-20th century consensus, like wherever you were on the political spectrum, you kind of wanted to make things better. Now that may be an incredibly idealistic, false perception on my part, but even the pretence of that appears to have broken down now. I think that you're going to have some organizations and Artists and people and whoever who are going to just go look, there's no money. We got to do what we got to do to get people to survive. So all this other stuff, fine and not yet. Don't be silly. There's going to be that underneath it. I think there's going to be a hard edge. Another bunch of people kind of go, and we cannot because this is unsustainable. We cannot keep treating this group of people this way. This is utterly immoral, unsustainable. This is part of the reason why we're in the problems. We're in this situation, it's not part of it, this is the reason we're in the situation we're in. I see there's a polarization there. It's very difficult in a polarized situation to deal with that. Because that just happens. That's what happens.
Ben Yeoh (55:33): They're not listening to one another.
Lee Simpson (55:33): No.
Ben Yeoh (55:35): It's almost like that game where you have people in an asylum and one person talking, one thing and another person is talking another thing. Obviously, they're just talking like this. Whereas like you say, I'm not sure, but before it feels like you might've been talking different things, but you're listening to one another and saying, oh, we overlap here. So maybe we can do something. Now you're just talking here and here and well, that's it. Then the polarization increases and you just shout at one another and I don't know how you decide who wins, but someone does win eventually. Then that's what happened.
Lee Simpson (56:14): Absolutely! So what do you do in that situation? What do you do? I mean, you can pick a side. I think, -- I have no educational or evidential backup for any of this, but it feels like the tide of history is driving that polarization. It doesn't feel like it's a thing that's going to come together. It feels like there's a tide, which is driving that division. That division of worldview, it's not even a disagreement necessarily about what kind of world we want. It's a disagreement about what kind of world we're in. So when the whole 'Black Lives Matter' thing happened. Basically, people disagree about what is happening right now. Never mind what happened 50 years ago or how things should happen in 50 years’ time. Like right now, it's a literally violent and fundamental disagreement about what the situation is. That seems to be getting on with all issues. That seems to be getting more extreme.
Lee Simpson (57:46): I have no idea how you do anything about that and I'm not sure you can, or we can, or Improbable can. I know Improbable can't we are a little Theatre Company. We're a tiny Theatre company. We do a couple of things that come to mind. One of them is that it's sort of holding something. But holding space means something where there's some honesty. There's some humility. There are all the things that you hope to value and whether or not those things have an impact on the world. I mean, they usually don't. Whether or not those things spread to other people and they usually don't. It doesn't really matter. Just, shield the flame, shield the flame on the candle from the storm and keep it alight, if you can. In the hope that at some point these things can be listened to again. Because of these things, they're just not listened to. As you said, nobody's listening, but so let's keep it alive. I think that's one thing. That's what I feel about our open space work. It's like any kind of space alive. Keep a space open. Hold a space where people can come; can be themselves and have a conversation where people actually listen to each other. If nobody else in the world is doing that? Fine. Let's keep a space where that's happening. And of course, thousands of millions of people are doing the same thing. You have to trust that as well. I also think, and this is not very well thought through. I think there's something about Improvisation, which has a role to play in that. It goes back to and again, I lack all the evidence or the education to speak about this in any authoritative way. Nevertheless, I'm a white Englishman. I speak about things in an authoritative way, whether I know about them or not. That's my privilege. When Marx talked about alienation about the different kinds of alienation and he talks about alienation from ourselves.
To me, that's what I see. I see people disconnected from themselves and because they're disconnected from themselves, they are prey to, being exploited, their feelings and emotions, fears, worries and vulnerabilities being exploited by other people because there's not a really strong connection to their own sense of values. You have people who are beautiful fathers or mothers or brothers or sisters or whatever who are loving and considerate and caring and understanding in their own environments. Then will turn out to the world and start the most hateful, disgusting, vile, rubbish. There's a disconnect somewhere. There's a real disconnect. I think one of the things that Improvisation should do and can do is to connect someone to themselves. Because Improvisation is about people who would say, "Oh, Improv! No". The thing I know about that is you got to say, "yes". Oh no, that's one of the most misunderstood things in the world. Because what you're saying is what you're saying yes to? Are you saying yes to yourself? Are you saying yes to your own compassion? Are you saying yes to your own instincts and your own intuitions? Can you connect? You can't say yes to yourself until you connect to yourself. Most people aren't even aware of what's going on inside themselves. Aren't even aware of the minimal signals that are here. Never mind kind of amplifying them and finding out what's there. Improvisation is a way for people to do that, to connect to themselves. So they can connect to their intuition and their impulses. Genuinely connect to them and say yes to them. So the kind of theory that I bang around is, one of the things I think about is people who are disconnected from Art. Let's say, so my parents, my mum and dad considered themselves sort of people. Art was not for them. So painting, theatre, music, opera, whatever. That's not for the likes of us because we're working class and we don't understand it. Because we don't understand it, that must mean that we're stupid. That's for clever people. That's the people, yeah.
So Picasso is for people who are clever than us. So we don't understand that. So that must mean we're not. Now that's nonsense! But if you think if, if your own, if your interaction with Art is that it just makes you feel stupid. You also you'll stop interacting with Art why would you go, why would you pay, whatever 30 quid, to just sit in a theatre and made to feel stupid. You wouldn't do it. So they don't. My parents wouldn't and didn't. If they said yes to their own impulses if they saw a Picasso and went well, "That's a load of rubbish! Or I don't understand it, or I'm confused, or that makes me feel uncomfortable or oh, I'd like it, but I don't know why". What they would do is invalidate that response. Because they don't say yes to their own responses because they don't value their own responses. Because their responses are not worth anything and that's what they've been told. That's what has been demonstrated to them for their whole lives. If they valued that response, whether they liked the Arts or not is irrelevant, They value their response to the Arts. So they might go see a check-off play and go. Well, the middle bit was boring and not think I'm stupid because I didn't find it interesting, but go, I found it boring. Isn't that interesting. They could become interested in their own responses to Art. Then that changes their relationship to Art. That changes their relationship to what they perceive. Because as I say, whether there's a positive or a negative response, doesn't matter. They have a response. They value the response. They connect to their own response. That to me is potential, it could change everything. I think the way to do that, the way for people to experience that is through Improvisation. I think that's what Improvisation teaches us.
Ben Yeoh (1:05:07): That's fascinating. I hadn't considered that, but it seems true to me that Improv can teach you a lot about yourself and what you listen to or not. We have all of that status. I guess you could call it self esteem or even just thinking your own thoughts through. This allows you to engage with the wider world and then make those connections with, if I can love my own daughter, why can I not love other daughters or whatever? I'm slightly making it up to that, but that seems a perfectly plausible call for a transmission mechanism. I'd be interested to just reflect on a couple of things. Finally, one was how you came across open space and how you think about that? Because I think you said, "Oh, Improbable can't change the world and being a small organization". Actually, I could suggest that perhaps it has done a lot more, at least above its weight. One is through a devoted and disgruntled D and D. This is a kind of open space conference for people within Theatre, Performing Arts, while holding this space. Nevertheless, I also think to the extent that it will transmit and like you say, there may be a lot of people holding their own sort of spaces where it's a non-hierarchical almost participatory form of conference or meeting where people propose their own idea to talk about. Here they can self-organize, which has lots of cousin parallel with some of the things we're seeing in deliberative democracy or assemblies or essentially these are techniques and tools for listening to one another and finding a way through to put it at that very high level of which this seems to be quite an important part.
So, I was interested to reflect on how Improbable found open space and maybe to sort of push you the other way to reflect about how it might be having a larger impact than you might think, maybe because we're in the story. So we're not going to see how those effects are rippling back as this pushback. Because when you talk about the candle, a phrase I think about is actually, there is never enough darkness to put out the light of a lit candle. So if you can keep it alight, actually it still seems to replace. It seems that open space has done that for the Theatre Industry and might be doing it more broadly. So I'd be interested in maybe how I came across it and what it's done for you?
Lee Simpson (1:07:46): I mean, Phelim found it. Phelim came across it. He was fascinated by it and said, "Oh, I'm going to do this". Phelim sent out an invitation. We didn't know what would happen. Then 300 people turned up. That's kind of typically Improbable what will often happen is, Fabian will read a book. I mean, I sort of began this by saying, my Drama teacher read a book and it changed his life. So now it's Phelim, we'll read a book and go, "Oh, let's do this". It's some crazy idea. Phelim kind of drove it through, really drove it through. We had no idea what this thing was. He didn't know what this thing was. He thought, well, anyway, I'm going to find out about it by doing it. So we did it. That's a very common thing with Improbable is if we do something that we don't know how to do yet, that's when we operate at our absolute best. That's when we make our best work and our biggest breakthroughs. That's not all. That's, I think, fair. I think Brian talks about swimming out till your feet can't quite touch through the sea bed or something. So that's how we found it. I think the reason why we took to it so enthusiastically is that we saw in it what we'd already been doing but in a slightly more organized form. So we saw it. We looked at it and went, "Oh, this is how we do our rehearsals, essentially. This is how we make work. This is how we work already". But this is it, those sorts of processes given over to a large complex conversation with a large group of people. So it felt very familiar and very, very quickly.
So we started to bring sort of more open space structures into the Rehearsal Room. I think we take our Rehearsal Room's cells into our open space. It's very hard. One of the things about open space, that's brilliant, but also problematic is it's very hard to track its impact because it's not built to evaluate because it's random and its effects are deep. So it's rather like a piece of Theatre or any piece of Art. It's an act of faith. Sometimes, there are things that come out of it, which you can say, "Oh yeah, that definitely came from the day or that definitely came in D and D or whatever". But mostly you don't know. People meet and have a conversation and something sparks and off they go and they create something or people find a different way of being in a space and may take that somewhere. It's very simple. I think I know that, it's absolutely integral to what we do know. It solved a riddle for us. So we were making Theatre and making work and Improvising. But we hadn't worked out a way to do that without the lights coming on and an audience paying money and, and making a show. An open space gave us that devoted and disgruntled person that gave us that opportunity to take all the stuff we'd learn, making an Improvising into a more direct relationship with people and people's challenges and people's issues.
Ben Yeoh (1:11:45): I think that's great. I think it's okay not to be measured because you've got these two opposing forces. One idea which comes from, I guess, company speaking, which is what, what isn't measured, doesn't get managed. So this is this idea that you've got to measure and impact everything. But there's the opposing force, which is that a lot of things that count can't be counted, which I think is equal and opposing and potentially greater. I think back, if you think about the power of Art or this connection, this language of listening that the Texan lawyer, the white Texan lawyer for Martin Luther King Jr. A key part of his team, which introduced rights for minorities in the US. He joined Martin Luther's team because several years before he had heard Louis Armstrong play Jazz. When he heard Armstrong play Jazz and he listened to it. He essentially said, he wrote down in his diary and this sets him on his life path that, "I have heard genius in a black man. The only thing I can think about is how we need to give these people equality". From that, it all started. This one idea. I kind of turned around the phrase that sort of snowflake has been taken, I guess people are talking about work now, but this idea of a snowflake. Well, a snowflake goes on a mountain and actually causes the avalanche. You don't know which snowflake it will be, or maybe you will melt, but actually, you get enough of them together and you can be very surprised about that, about that impact.
Lee Simpson (1:13:32): Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Ben Yeoh (1:13:34): So perhaps one last question then to surround everything else off, thinking about all of the really amazing, fascinating topics here, stretching on philosophy, games and Improv, and what to think about the world is. Maybe what advice or thoughts would you have for a young person, about going into the world? Maybe not even just the young person, but any person. But maybe a young person, potentially who is thinking about an Artistic career, but maybe not, right? They just maybe finished university or they're thinking about going to university. What would you suggest they think about in terms of what they should maybe do or listen to or think about doing with their lives?
Lee Simpson (1:14:20): I mean, my advice would be don't listen to me
Ben Yeoh (1:14:24): Right.
Lee Simpson (1:14:28): Really. I'm amazed by young people. I'm amazed by the world that they are having to negotiate. It Feels to me, just maybe a matter of perception, it feels to be more dangerous, more tricky, more complicated or aggressive and the stakes feel higher to me. So I don't know if I would have any advice. It would be sort of stuff that I would say like, "It's going to be okay. You're going to be okay".
Ben Yeoh (1:15:17): Yeah, I think that's important. It's going to be okay. Well, I sometimes have a game where I or we in a group imagine what someone else would say. So we call them like what would Phantom Boris Johnson say here?
Ben Yeoh (1:15:33): Right.
Ben Yeoh (1:15:34): Inevitably, you get that right. But reflecting on this conversation, I would say my Phantom Lee would say, to go out in the world and listen. I think that's one of the themes that come through. However, that means to listen to yourself, truly kind of your own thoughts and views, to the extent that you can get there and listen to others, which would be both your peers. Perhaps, also, the people you disagree with and see whether you can hear the heart of what they're saying, to really understand why you might disagree or not disagree. Additionally, I've come away with the sense that a big part of the language of Improv is this listening. Whether you're listening to the audience, yourself, your players, that you're playing with and all of these other techniques, which can build on that actually fall apart. If you can't get the listening part, right because you can't build on that. I'd obviously thought about that a little bit, but I hadn't put together how many aspects of that tie so many of those things together and actually tie so much of your work together. I think in quite a fruitful way. So I don't know if you agree with my version of a Phantom Lee there.
Lee Simpson (1:16:58): No, I like it. That does sound like it.
Ben Yeoh (1:16:58): Maybe that's probably one level slightly deeper than how most people think about, "Oh, you know, go and get a job or whatever". I do think there is something about that listening aspect, which seems to come through quite clearly.
Lee Simpson (1:17:15): I think you're right. I would not disown that Phantom Lee at all. I would perfectly, I would take credit for what, you have him say definitely. The thing that popped into my head as you were talking was, I guess the only other thing, and that's, I've done this by accident because I was forced into it. But I think it's like, have a think about what your identity is? By that I mean, who are you? Who you are not? What you do and what you don't do? Have a think about what the edges of you are. What are your expectations? Play consciously around those edges. Is it possible for you to go to a place where, whether that's in terms of your views, what do you read? What do you interact with? Who do you interact with? Who are your friends? Where have you been geographically? See what it's like to step outside that a little bit. Don't kind of suddenly jump out of an airplane, but there's no -- You don't. I'm not saying that it doesn't have to leap over the edge without any awareness, but really play and flirt and have a game of stepping into that place where you don't quite know what you're doing. As I talked about earlier, this is when we've done our best work with Improbable when we've kind of gone. Oh yeah. Okay then, okay. We don't quite know what we're doing and it reveals brilliant and beautiful things and it expands who you are. I think I was forced to do that because of where I came from geographically and socially or whatever. But if you'd said to me, before I did my first gig at the Comedy Store. If you'd said to me, do you want to do it? I just said, "No! I'm terrified! If I choose it, I have a choice around that. There's no way I'm going to do that!" But you kind of dare yourself to do it.
Therefore, you do it and you're alive and you survive. When they asked me to be a member of the company's top players, I seriously thought about saying, “No, because I thought I can't be funny every week. I can't do that. That's not me. Then I went, ``I'll do it". So who, I was just stretched a little bit, just a tiny bit, just stressed a little bit, and then it opened up a whole other story, a whole other part of the world for you. So that, I guess that's another thing I would say, because the forces of the world, trying to keep you on the track, you're on trying to keep you in the space that you're in, trying to keep you as a person that they perceive you to be very, very strong. You have to, I think, take a conscious and deliberate step beyond that.
Ben Yeoh (1:19:28): Yeah. I think that's true that you have to take what you might view as a risk. Albeit not out of the plane, but just off the path. I see this in creative endeavours all the time where artistes or Theatre companies end up going for the safer bet. Actually, it's riskier to play it safe because that is not as creative or interesting to anyone, mostly yourself, but everyone else, therefore, watching to find that. Well, that has been an amazing conversation. So I will wrap up by just saying, "Thank you so very much, Lee".
Lee Simpson (1:20:13): Thank you for having me. I've had a blast.
