LIFEGAME - Press Reviews

Imagine This Is Your Life as performance art. Since 1998, Improbable theatre has been touring internationally a theatre production of Keith Johnstone’s Lifegame which has to be different every evening because its material is taken from whatever that evening’s surprise guest reveals about his or her life. What are your memories of early childhood? When was your first kiss and with whom? What is the most romantic thing you’ve ever done? What was it like when your father died? What’s the happiest experience of your professional life? Finally: how would you like to die? As the guest answers each question, the eight performers try acting scenes from the life that’s is being described, and the guest is encouraged to ring a handbell when the scene seems true or honk a horn when it feels wrong. The performers add music and sound effects, they change the lighting, they change body language and accents. Sometimes they try cartoon exaggerations of the scene and sometimes they turn it into music. The guest may be asked to take part, but playing a different role. The result is often hootingly funny, sometimes exceptionally touching. And the strangest thing is that we watch as if we are the guest, standing outside our own lives. Lifegame arrives for a sell-out season at the National Theatre, with a youthful audience lapping it up. At the performance I attended, the guest was Richard Eyre, the former artistic director of the National Theatre. The scene when young Eyre is left at boarding school by his mother was turned into a musical number, a quartet for “Eyre” and other boys, funny and heart-catching in its lyricism. The real Eyre became the schoolmaster who cast young Eyre in the school play. More heartstoppingly, the real Eyre became God, talking to the now adult Eyre at the bedside of his dead father. And a finale showed Eyre dying happy on the press night of a show he’d directed, while everyone gave it a standing ovation.

First kisses…last rites…scary monsters…idyllic days…instant, do-it-yourself drama. Biography becomes theatre, the past not a foreign country but fresh, recently trampled terrain in Improbable’s latest, improvised show. Based on an idea by the impro guru Keith Johnstone, the basis of Lifegame is simple. A guest maybe famous, probably not, is interviewed on stage by Phelim McDermott. The rest of the cast improvise scenes garnered from the information the guest supplies and the stories he or she tells. Lives flash by, but the guest is waving, not drowning. The whole idea sounds like a cross between a therapy session and a chat show, and it certainly includes elements of both. I must admit that when I first heard about it, I thought it was exactly the sort of thing I’d pay money not to have to go and see. Yet, to my surprise, it works, and although it could easily be banal, I imagine that in most circumstances it is more likely to be truly fantastic theatre – spontaneous, unique, universal and mythological. At the very least, what it does is to set up an explosive chain of your own memories. It acknowledges that the audience bring their own baggage to the evening as much as their guest. It is fascinating because it is as much about the process of memory as it is about memory itself. It works because other people’s lives, however mundane, are endlessly fascinating. Its starting point is that nobody is boring and nobody is ordinary. We are all interesting. Most importantly it succeeds because the cast resist the temptation to play for laughs. That’s not to say that it’s a glum evening, although potential guests must surely be vetted to ensure that those more in need of the psychiatrist’s chair than the theatre spotlight are wedded out. Every show, of course, is completely different. The one I saw in Sheffield had Nick Whitfield, a writer, recalling his early life – and then, most poignantly, projecting into the future. But what was really engaging was the feeling of seeing somebody’s life excavated before your very eyes and of the subject being as surprised as the audience by what was revealed. “So is that what it was like?” asked McDermott after one particularly zany enactment. “Yes,” said Whitfield wonderingly. “Yes. That’s how it was.” Not just for him, but for us too.