| It’s a safe bet that when most Calgarians are laughing their asses off at an episode of Who’s Line is It Anyway?, they don’t realize that the man whose games inspired that TV show – and continue to influence countless comedians and actors all over the world – is living right under their noses.
You don’t have to climb a mountain to find improv guru Keith Johnstone – he’s no further away than an untidy little bungalow in Killarney, where he continues to write about his ideas, critique his unruly progeny and wage his quixotic lifelong battle against all that is dishonest and clever in theatre.
An extensive profile of Johnstone, the man who invented Theatresports, the godfather (sometimes reluctantly) of Who’s Line, Canada’s Kids in the Hall and Britain’s Improbable Theatre, to name a few, has been long overdue. So it’s great news that Bravo! will be airing an hour-long documentary on him, The World According to Keith, on December 17 at 6 p.m. And it’s even better news to report that the filmmakers, Vancouver’s Executive Pictures, have done an excellent job of interviewing the many and varied people involved in, or influenced by, Johnstone’s work, from his esteemed colleagues in the bubbling creative cauldron of London’s postwar Royal Court Theatre to the current stars of Who’s Line to the alumni of Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre Company.
Then there is Johnstone himself, who, despite being reduced to sound bites like the other subjects, still manages to reveal his disarming personality – a harsh critic and habitual iconoclast hidden in the frumpy, shambling mannerisms of a gentle English eccentric. Because Johnstone can frame a withering put-down with a Cheshire Cat grin, it’s easy not to take his opinions too seriously, but at least the film doesn’t duck his criticism of Who’s Line – which he feels is a bastardization of improv in favour of cheap laughs – and also allows the producer and cast members of the series to respond. Mark McKinney of the Kids in the Hall sums up the TV view best: "If you’re producing Who’s Line, you don’t want to go, ‘Yay, we made the audience cry! What? We’re cancelled?’"
In fact, while comedians such as McKinney and Colin Mochrie have helped popularize his work, Johnstone often acts as though comedy has been his particular cross to bear. As the film reveals, he started out in theatre as an experimental playwright and script reader and, even at a young age, became known, according to director William Gaskill, as "the unpaid conscience of the Royal Court." That theatre’s experiments in kitchen-sink realism didn’t go far enough for Johnstone, leading him to form his first improv-based troupe, Theatre Machine, which came to Canada for Expo 67. With that company and, later, with Loose Moose – which he co-founded after taking a teaching post at the University of Calgary in the 1970s – he attempted to create theatre that was both broadly popular and inherently honest.
He scored on the popularity front when he devised Theatresports, the competitive improv game that spread like wildfire and would provide a performing entree for such talents as Mochrie and Wayne Brady (who first played Theatresports in Vancouver and Orlando, Florida, respectively) and McKinney and Bruce McCulloch, who learned their improv chops at Loose Moose. The honesty has been another matter. Improv is so easily used to get laughs that few improvisers go any deeper, much to Johnstone’s despair. His solution has been the Life Game, in which actors instantly improvise scenes based on a guest’s life that may be sad, touching or even traumatic – in the film, Johnstone directs a Life Game in which Moose vet Eric Amber recalls being thrashed by his father for stealing – as well as funny.
A key to what Johnstone is seeking with improv is found in his favourite play, the one that got him, as a hungry young art teacher, into theatre in the 1950s – Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s ability to turn comedy into tragedy at the drop of a bowler hat, and both his canny use and fearless subversion of theatrical convention, are at the root of what Johnstone is after when he creates and directs his games, and I wish this film had done more than briefly mention their acquaintance. Johnstone has directed Godot a number of times, most recently in 1998 at the Moose, in a lively staging that was a wonderfully irreverent alternative to all those deadly, Sam-wanted-it-this-way productions that critics and audiences dutifully take like doses of bad-tasting medicine. Yet when I asked him about it later, Johnstone intimated that he was less than thrilled with his production. Like Count Pococurante in Voltaire’s Candide, nothing pleases him.
If there’s a problem with The World According to Keith, it’s that the makers – director Arlene Rimer and writer Cassandra Freeman – have tried to shoehorn so much of Johnstone’s life and teachings into 48 minutes that significant aspects such as this are skimmed over. And there is no attempt to put his theories in historical context – his forerunner, Viola Spolin, and her equally influential improv exercises, aren’t even mentioned. Still, this is an entertaining introduction to a brilliant, complex man who has become, when all is said and done, the Stanislavsky of improvisation. |
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