The perfect improv comedy pub
A choose your own adventure in the London black-box theatre scene....
You stand at the door to this, the perfect improv pub.
A charming mix of Georgian grandeur and flat-roof post-war estate pub, the architect clearly intended-... WOW, there’s a lot of people in the beer garden having a great time!
None of them have tickets to your show. Don’t worry about it, you’ve got eight pre-sales and Alex said he’d come down after coaching The Incurable Donkey Butt.
Improvisers don’t belong outside, so in you go. That’s a musty smell, isn’t it? Someone ordered the fish. It’s the third major food group on a confusing menu, after tapas and pizza.
You order a drink at the bar. They have fifteen different wines and a rotating whirlwind of craft ales, but you always order a Brixton Reliance Pale Ale. That’ll be £6.90. A sound investment for the privilege of interacting with the array of cute pub dogs. They don’t have tickets either.
‘What’s on tonight?’. A fair question, except the bar-staff have no idea that comedy happens upstairs. They’re certain they don’t like you though.
Shrug it off. You’re here for a greater purpose anyway. You’d never come here if there weren’t four nights of improv a week. Tonight’s the best one: Inaccessible Esoteric Formats night. One team is going to do a Detour with an Invocation opening, but it’s also a La Ronde. It’ll make sense when you see it.
Up to the venue. It’s always up. Scaling your improv Everest (a rickety stairwell), you reach the hallowed turf (sticky floorboards) of the ampitheatre (50-60 audience seats in varying states of disrepair).
Whoops, you’ve looked directly at the stage lights as they came on again. Those spots in your eyes should clear by the time you’re on stage, when you’ll look directly at them again.
The temperature? Either meat freezer and molten surface of the sun, often in the same night. You pick the back corner to sit when you’re not performing. That’s where it’s coolest. You can safely lean your forehead on the cold brick wall and do slightly-too-loud bits with your teammate there.
There used to be four chairs, but since the infamous ‘My eyelids are chairs!’ Harold, two have perished. The ones that remain will be car seats, sofas, a doctor’s waiting room and more. They’ll get in the way after the last scene’s improvisers didn’t put them back. They’ll make really loud noises against the floor. They’ll creak embarrassingly when you sit on them. But no-one must ever stand on them. They’re all we have.
Time for warm-ups. Sam is late again and hates doing a mind-meld anyway. There’s three teams and only two rooms, so something has to give. Two teams will warm-up together, complicating matters massively and making everyone worry they’re not funny enough.
Your team retreats to the green room. There’s enough space for four of your six-person team between a pile of coats, several amps, a full-set of cricket pads and the posters for last month’s shows which never went up. There are no mirrors. Take a beat to behold Western Europe’s largest tower of trash creeping majestically out of the top of the only bin. You make a note to helpfully take the bin-bag out, then immediately forget.
The technician enters, interrupting an ethically-dubious round of categories at exactly the right moment. It’s time to open the doors.
You visit the loos to clear some pre-show nerves. The facilities are, of course, disgusting and insufficiently numerous for the eighteen performers who wish to use them.
Back in the green room, you get each other’s backs, pace around nervously and chuck a heavy basketball at face height between the least sporty people you know.
The show will go well, but no-one will admit it. It’s much more humble to apologise for everything you did. You all head down to the bar for the night of your lives. The audience can barely believe how good the show was, but you’ll downplay it anyway (‘Really? But we missed so many edits in that tag run’).
You’ll drink until the wee small hours of 11.30pm. It’s a Saturday, but the pub insists on closing early and turfing you out.
It’s not much, but it’s everything. This is where you’re going to conjure entire worlds of imagination with your best friends (or play a farting ghost with a gambling addiction, it’s all ART). It’s where you’ll return week after week for no money, just because you love it.
Years will go by and everything will feel the same until you see that green room photo from 2016. How we’ve aged.
This is where all that aging happened. Your home. The perfect improv pub.
Please don’t stand on the chairs.
Really enjoyed this Shaun especially the last bit. Such a lovely way of putting it : )