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Impro
'Impro is the most dynamic, funny, wise, practical and provocative book
on theatre craft that I have ever read' (James Roose-Evans).
Keith Johnstone's involvement with the theatre began when George
Devine and Tony Richardson, artistic directors of the Royal Court
Theatre, commissioned a play from him. This was in 1956. A few years
later he was himself Associate Artistic Director, working as a play
reader and director, in particular helping to run the Writers' Group.
The improvisatory techniques and exercises evolved there to foster
spontaneity and narrative skills were developed further in the actors'
studio, then in demonstrations to schools and colleges and ultimately
in the founding of a company of performers, called The Theatre
Machine.
Divided into four sections, 'Status', 'Spontaneity', 'Narrative Skills'
and 'Masks and Trance', arranged more or less in the order a group
might approach them, the book sets out the specific techniques and
exercises which Johnstone has himself found most useful and most
stimulating. The result is both an ideas book and a fascinating explora
tion of the nature of spontaneous creativity.
'The book's incredible achievement is its success in making improvisa
tion re-live on the page ... Get Mr Johnstone's fascinating manual and
I promise you that if you open at the first page and begin to read you
will not put it down until the final page.' (Yorkshire Post)
'He suggests a hundred practical t~chniques for encouraging spon
taneity and originality by catching the subconscious unawares. But what
makes the book such fun is the teacher's wit. Here is an inexhaustible
supply of zany suggestions for unfreezing the petrified imagination.'
(Daily Telegraph)
The front cover shows a moment from The Defeat of Giant Big Nose, an
improvised children's play presented by Keith Johnstone's Loose Moose
Theatre Company in Calgary, Alberta. Photo by Deborah A. Iozzi.
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Also Available
Eugenio Barba
DICTIONARY OF THEATRE ANTHROPOLOGY:
The Secret Art of the Performer
Jean Benedetti
STANISLAYSKI: AN INTRODUCTION
Augusto Boal
GAMES FOR ACTORS AND NON~ACTORS
Richard Boleslavsky
ACTING: THE FIRST SIX LESSONS
Jean N ewlove
LABAN FOR ACTORS AND DANCERS
Constantin Stanislavski
AN ACTOR PREPARES
BUILDING A CHARACTER
CREATING A ROLE
MY LIFE IN ART
STANISLAYSKI'S LEGACY
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IMPRO
Improvisation and the Theatre
KEITH JOHNSTONE
With an Introduction by
IRVING WARDLE
A THEATRE ARTS BOOK
ROUTLEDGE
New York
Published by Routledge /Theatre Arts Books
27911W Tehstir3d5 AthvSentrueeet
NNeeww YYoorrkk,, NNYY 1100000117
First published in paberback in 1981 byEyre Methuen Ltd
Reprinted 1982, 1983, 1985, 1987
Reprinted in 1989by Methuen Drama,
MichelinHouse, 81 FulhamRoad, LondonSW3 6RB
Reprinted 1990, 1991, 1992
Originallypublished in hardback
by Faberand Faber Ltd in 1979.
Corrected for this edition by the author
Copyright© 1979, 1981 by Keith Johnstone
Introductioncopyright© 1979 by Irving Wardle
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
Library ofCongressCataloging-in-Publication Data
availableon request
All rights reserved. No partofthis bookmay be reprinted or reproduced
orutilized inanyform orbyany electronic, mechanical, orothermeans,
nowknownorhereafterinvented, includingphotocopyingandrecording
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writingfrom the publishers.
ISBN 13: 978-0-87830-117-1
Contents
INTRODUCTION 9
NOTES ON MYSELF 13
STATUS 33
SPONT ANEITY 75
NARRATIVE SKILLS 109
MASKS AND TRANCE 143
APPENDIX 206
Introduction
If teachers were honoured in the British theatre along
side directors, designers, and playwrights, Keith Johnstone would be
as familiar a name as are those of John Dexter, Jocelyn Herbert,
Edward Bond and the other young talents who were drawn to the
great lodestone of the Royal Court Theatre in the late 19505. As head
of the Court's script department, Johnstone played a crucial part in
the development of the 'writers' theatre', but to the general public he
was known only as the author of occasional and less than triumphant
Court plays like Brixham Regatta and Performing Giant. As he
recounts in this book, he started as a writer who lost the ability to
write, and then ran into the same melancholy impasse again when he
turned to directing.
What follows is the story of his escape.
I first met Johnstone shortly after he had joined the Court as a
Ios-a-script play-reader, and he struck me then as a revolutionary
idealist looking around for a guillotine. He saw corruption every
where. John Arden, a fellow play-reader at that time, recalls him as
'George Devine's subsidised extremist, or Keeper of the King's
Conscience'. The Court then set up its Writers' Group and Actors'
Studio, run by Johnstone and William Gaskill, and attended by
Arden, Ann Jellicoe and other writers of the Court's first wave. This
was the turning point. 'Keith', Gaskill says, 'started to teach his own
particular style of improvisation, much of it based on fairy stories,
word associations, free associations, intuitive responses, and later he
taught mask work as well. All his work has been to encourage the
rediscovery of the imaginative response in the adult; the refinding of
the power of the child's creativity. Blake is his prophet and Edward
Bond his pupil.'
Johnstone's all-important first move was to banish aimless dis
cussion and transform the meetings to enactment sessions; it was
what happened that mattered, not what anybody said about it. 'It is
hard now to remember how fresh this idea was in 1958,' Ann Jellicoe
says, 'but it chimed in with my own way of thinking.' Other members
were Arnold Wesker, Wole Soyinka, and David Cregan as well as
