Interview with Lee Simpson by Jane Milling on Improbable’s work and process

December 2004

How was Improbable formed?

I came through drama school and comedy improv, Phelim through a performing arts degree at Middlesex, where he worked with Jon Wright and Julia Bardsley, and Julian was a maker who worked with Welfare State International. He was a trickster who worked with ‘big wobbly puppets’, as he calls them.

Phelim and I have worked together since around 1986-7. We did a show at Nottingham Playhouse, Doctor Faustus. Julian was at Leicester with Julia Bardsley. Someone told Phelim that Julian was lazy and we’d never get a set out of him, and Phelim thought ‘That’s a person I can work with’, and because Julian was improvising in making design.

An early show we worked on was Improbable Tales, which was all improvised. We had a huge set with flat scenes, and musicians and lighting operator improvising in the whole theatre. There was a quiet lad called Paul on the book, it was his first time on the book and of course there was no book to be on. But he’d call a scene, and have to decide what to do, so he’d go ‘Bring on a cave’ and then we had to deal with that on stage.

Phelim was working with derek derek, and went on a course with Keith Johnstone. Guy Dartnell gave up his place on the course, but wanted to know what happened, so we set up a workshop to show him. Phelim and Julian wanted to use improvisation for shows, but they had no experience, I had improvisation experience so got roped in.

Initially we were all resistant to forming a company, because we know too many theatre companies which formed and made one interesting show, then they make a show that’s not quite as interesting, and the next show not quite as interesting as that….
We got together because we found we were solving the same problems again and again - how to make something alive, in a Rep structure and theatre, which is not usually built for that.

Improbable is about changing the scale and not making stuff for the same place.
If you work in Rep you have to make the whole building fall in love with you. We were hungry to do that, and solved that problem several times, but Phelim wanted to move on to do more personal work (which led to 70 Hill Lane). However, to get funding from the Arts Council and other funding bodies you have got to form a theatre company, so we gave in reluctantly.

How do you make your shows?

Improvisation is a part of the making or the performing of all shows. We record our improvisation on video but we don’t transcribe them.

Do you look at them in rehearsal?

No! We only do basic improvisation in rehearsal.

Can you give me an example?

Well, one word at a time, you know two people working with each other and talking one word at a time. That’s the only impro we know. We use a version of Gaulier’s The Game, Le Jeu.
Phelim does all the workshops [with Gaulier and Lecoq] and teaches me. I’m too lazy to go. I’m the oik - you can write that down.
We don’t do warmups, and we’re fantastically unphysical.

In doing improvisation on stage, the mechanisms are the same as in the rehearsal. For example, we start with newspapers, we do that in rehearsal, we teach that in workshops. Really we never rehearse, we only make theatre. Rehearsals are making all the time.

Sticky began from a workshop on materials that Julian did. But you have to decide on structure when you are dealing with cranes and fireworks and safety. Actually, sellotape has been a thread through lots of work, it began in Animo, and in 70 Hill Lane, which was supposed to be a newspaper show, the sellotape was just to join the newspaper together, but slowly sellotape took over. Colin Grenfell brought lights into the rehearsal and when we saw the light on the sellotape we went ‘Oh Yes!’.

You have a very close relationship with your audience.

If you go on stage you are telling a story and you have to be aware you are telling a story, you have to have a relationship with the audience and you have to be aware you have a relationship with the audience.

You bolt it together. This show, The Animo Project, we bolt it together on stage. On other shows some of the bolting goes on offstage, some of it onstage. It’s almost as if the show exists as a material you can mould.
The audience is a feedback loop, and it’s a negotiation. We’re all in the same room, we have to make a connection. Something should happen. Performers have to be vulnerable, not to be clever or skillful. Stay awake and don’t panic – that’s our job.

For example, when Phelim sat down and started writing with a quill, what came into my head was ‘he’s illuminating a bible’ and I tried to put that out of my head because I didn’t think that was what he meant. But it’s in my head, so I get up and go over as a monk, and I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I’m terrified. That’s how to stay awake.

If anything Improbable is about faith in the magic of theatre.


Your pace of improvisation is slower than I’ve seen elsewhere.

Yes, the only thing that makes theatre work is the audience imagining that it works. So you have to give them time to imagine. Tonight the newspaper improvisation was about an old lady who dances in a dusty ballroom. It’s just the same in fact if you’re doing Hamlet, with all the scenery and text and everything. You are utterly reliant on the creative power of the audience. You’ve got to give them time to believe and to decide for themselves what it is. If you tell them they might not see that, there’s nothing worse than being told what to think.

For example, when you are in the mask, you wait, and something happens, and you make a guess. The audience don’t mind changing their minds, as long as you don’t tell them what to think. They are happy to see a mask and think it’s a soldier, and then you put a hat on him, and they think, it’s a gardener.

We do do some mask work in improvisation. But in rehearsal we get interested in things and then the moment passes and we don’t do it for a while and then we go back to it. Like Animo, it’s a show from our beginning that we go back to. It’s tempting to stay with the same stuff, to protect yourself.


What role, if any, do writers have in your process?

We have used ourselves as writers on occasion. I have ended up doing some writing. For Hanging Man, I decided to write a script before rehearsal, and started to write, but failed to do it. Initially on Hanging Man I wrote the story as if written by a 17th century historian writing a history, in order to remove it. But by the time of rehearsal it was only half done.

When on stage, with an audience, it is clear if you allow it to be, and it is possible to describe the impossible. The basic story of Hanging Man was a man who tries to hang himself, and Death won’t take him, and eventually Death does take him. We also had a painting. I had expanded on the first part when we started rehearsal.

For Theatre of Blood, I am writing the show, based on the film, because it is such a complex plot that it needs structuring and sorting out. The other work we do is very simple - Hanging Man had a one line plot and the stories we do in Animo are very simple.

For Theatre of Blood, we’re working on the text using the Wexner model of instant acting. The actors aren’t allowed to learn their lines. You get the actors to sit down and read the play through slowly, and you record that. Then you play it back and they have to just look at each other and act to it. Then you sit down and record it again and get up and they have to act it again, but they are not allowed to do the same thing. They produce different recordings, different emotion, different use of space, different relationships. Sometimes you pause the recording and they have to keep acting and then you start it again. And then you get them to perform it, and they think they don’t know their lines, but they do and they carry on. It’s difficult because in this play the actor has to do great chunks of Shakespeare, and he has to find a way of acting that.

Phelim says it’s effective because actors never think they’ll think of something better, but of course, they do.


Every project is different, and we don’t know what we’ll do before we start, so we have no fixed way of working. But before every show we do we have to decide on casts, on budgets to get funding and on blurb before we have a show. Most shows rehearse for about 5 or 6 weeks: some take longer, like The Hanging Man.

You have to decide on the set before the show, so you make some bold decisions. So for Shockheaded Peter, we wanted a little theatre, for Hanging Man we said let’s have ropes and pulleys and trapdoors. The show is made from the kit. With Hanging Man we had a completed set and no idea how we were going to use it. We said ‘Let’s have a trap door here’, without knowing why we wanted it. It was really made in the technical rehearsal. We arrive and go ‘What haven’t we used yet’ in the technical rehearsal and the set becomes the story of the show. ‘We haven’t used that seat that goes up in the air on the pole yet, let’s use it in this scene’. We have the story, and sometimes the actors have learned their lines, and sometimes we just have the story of that scene.
Venues always think we’re going to be a nightmare in technical rehearsal, because we’re going to want things at the last minute, or cut things, but actually we really use the set and we almost never cut things out. We’ve never really had a dress rehearsal. Phelim thinks we have but he can’t name the show where it happened. But each show ends when we run out of technical time in the rehearsal. So we really use our sets. We are very flexible and incorporate all the set into the show.


We are deeply old-fashioned. Like Paul Merton and a lot of ‘new comics’ their work harks back to their grandfathers’ generation, not their fathers, they have more in common with Buster Keaton than Jimmy Tarbuck. At the National someone said let’s do a show in the round and be very radical, defeat proscenium arch theatre. Phelim said ‘We love the proscenium arch, all our shows are proscenium. We couldn’t do it without the proscenium’. Panto is revolutionary, melodrama is the latest thing.