LIFEGAME

Lifegame is part chat show, part impro show.

There is a different guest every night who the cast has never met. 

There is an interviewer asking the guest about their life; people, places, events.
There are performers who turn those people, places and events into theatre.

No two shows are ever the same, anything can happen!

LIFEGAME is theatrical biography. The show takes the bare bones of a life story by interviewing a guest onstage and then transforming that information, there and then, into a magical piece of theatre. Each LIFEGAME has a different “subject” each night, because LIFEGAME has a different guest each night.

By transforming someone’s memories into theatrical language, LIFEGAME triggers details within those memories as well as new memories. Consequently LIFEGAME is not just about the stories that are told, but the process of remembering. The spectacle of someone discovering and remembering feelings from their past makes for electrifying theatre.

LIFEGAME is a show constantly in search of fresh ways to tell a story, a show that believes if purely personal experiences can be translated into theatrical language, they become universal.

ROOM FOR WRITING

While Improbable are performing Lifegame in the theatre, in the Lyric cafe there will be ‘Room for Writing,’ for telling and recording your own stories, making up some new ones, reading and listening to those of others.

Members of Improbable and the Lifegame team will be there too: come and join them, write in company or go into a quiet corner and scribble on your own.

Write about a memory, a future dream, a lie you’d like to tell….
Anyone of any age is welcome – children, grandparents, teenagers, waitresses, traffic wardens, astronauts…..everybody likes a story, everyone has one to tell.

Creative Team:
Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson, Julian Crouch, Guy Dartnell, Angela Clerkin, Niall Ashdown, Stella Duffy, Toby Park, Keith Jonhnstone, Colin Grenfell, and guests

Photographs on website for LIFEGAME by:
Keith Pattison, 2004

LIFEGAME was first performed at Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal on 20 March 1998. It has been presented nationally in Bath Theatre Royal, Bath; Bonnington Theatre, Nottingham; Everyman, Liverpool; Lyric Hammersmith, London; MAC, Birmingham; Newcastle Playhouse, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne; Phoenix Arts, Leicester; Purcell Room, South Bank Centre, London; Sheffield Crucible Studio, Sheffield; The National Theatre, London; Tron, Glasgow; Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry; and West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds.

Internationally LIFEGAME has been presented in Jane Street Theatre, New York, USA; La Jolla Playhouse, San Diego, USA; The Energex Brisbane Festival, Australia