# Narrative Skills

**1**

---

_Playboy_: _Knife in the Water_ was an original, and unusual
screenplay. Where did you get the idea for it?
Polanski: It was the sum of several desires in me. I loved the
lake area in Poland and I thought it would make a
great setting for a film. I was thinking of a film with a
limited number of people in it as a form of challenge.
I hadn't ever seen a film with only three characters,
where no one else even appeared in the background.
The challenge was to make it in a way that the
audience wouldn't be aware of the fact that no one
else had appeared even in the background. As for the
idea, all I had in mind when I began the script was a
scene where two men were on a sailboat and one fell
overboard. But that was a starting-point, wouldn't
you agree?
_Playboy:_ Certainly, but a strange one. Why were you thinking
about a man falling out of a sailboat?
Polanski: There you go, asking me how to shrink my head
again. I don't _know_ why. I was interested in creating a
mood, an atmosphere, and after the film came out, a
lot of critics found all sorts of symbols and hidden
meanings in it that I hadn't even thought of. It made
me sick. (_Playboy_, December, 1971.)

---

I started my work on narrative by trying to make the improvisers
conscious of the implications of the scenes they played.
I felt that an artist ought to be
'committed', and that he should be held responsible for the effects of
his work---it seemed only common sense.
I got my students to analyse the
content of _Red Riding
Hood_ and
_The Sleeping
Beauty_ and
_Moby
Dick_ and
_The Birthday
Party_, but this made them even more
inhibited. I didn't realise that if the
people who thought up _Red Riding
Hood_ had been aware of the
implications, then they might never have written the story.
This was at a time when I had no
inspiration as a writer at all, but I didn't twig that the more I tried
to understand the 'real' meaning, the less I wrote.
When Pinter directs
[his
own plays he may say 'We may assume that what the author intended here
is . .
.'---and this is a sensible
attitude: the playwright is one person and the director another, even
when they share the same skull.]

When I ran the Royal Court's script department, I used to read about
fifty plays a week, and many of them seemed to betray their author's
conscious intention. At one time there was a glut of
plays about homosexual lovers whose happiness, or even lives, are
destroyed by the opposition of ignorant bigots.
I didn't see these as
pro-homosexual although I'm sure their authors did.
If I wrote such a play my
homosexuals would live happily ever after, just as my Goldilocks would
end up living in a commune with the bears.
Recent films in which the good
lawman comes to grief when he tries to fight the system
(_Walking Tall,
Serpico_) have the moral 'Don't stick
your neck out', but this may not be what their directors intend.
In the old days the honest sheriff
was triumphant; nowadays he's crippled, or dead.
Content lies in the
_structure_, in what happens, not
in what the characters say.

Even at the level of geometrical signs 'meaning' is
_ambiguous_.
A cross, a circle, and a swastika
contain a 'content' quite apart from those which we
_assign_ to them.
The swastika is symmetrical but
unbalanced: it's a good sign for power, it has a clawiness about it
(cartoonists drew swastika spiders scrabbling over the face of Europe).
The circle is stiller, is a much
better sign for eternity, for completeness.
The cross can stand for many
things, for a meeting-place, for a crossroads, for a kiss, for a reed
reflected in a lake, for a mast, for a sword---but it isn't meaningless
just because the interpretations aren't one-for-one.
Whatever a cross suggests to us it
won't have the same associations as a circle, which makes a much better
sign for a moon, for example, or for pregnancy.
Moby Dick may be a symbol for the
'life-force', or for 'evil' and we can add anything it suggests to us,
but the area of legitimate association is limited.
There are things the white whale
_doesn't_ symbolise, as well as
things it does, and once you start combining signs together in a
narrative the whole thing becomes too complex.
A story is as difficult to
interpret as a dream, and the interpretation of a dream depends on who's
doing the interpreting. When
_King
Lear_ really gets going---the mad
King, the man pretending to be mad, the fool paid to be mad, and the
whole mass of overlapping and contradictory associations---what can the
spectator sensibly do but be swept away on the flood, and
_experience_ the play, instead of
trying to think what it 'means'.

[My
decision was that content should be ignored.
This wasn't a conclusion I wished
to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking.
I hadn't realised that every play
makes a political statement, and that the artist only needs to worry
about content if he's trying to fake up a personality he doesn't
actually have, or to express views he really isn't in accord with.
I tell improvisers to follow the
rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for
the material that emerges. If you improvise
spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your
innermost self will be revealed. The same is true of any
artist. If you want to write a
'working-class play' then you'd better
]_be_ working class.
If you want your play to be
religious, then _be_ religious.
An artist has to accept what his
imagination gives him, or screw up his
talent.

Alex Comfort once filmed some of my work, and he seemed surprised when
I told him that my students never attacked me physically.
He'd been explaining that I was
really operating as a therapist, that I was coaxing students into areas
that would normally be 'forbidden', and that spontaneity means
abandoning some of your defences.

I didn't have an answer at the time, except to say 'Well, they don't',
but my refusal to attribute any importance to content may be the answer.
If my students produce disturbing
material I link it with ideas of my own, or with something someone else
has produced, and I stop them feeling isolated or 'peculiar'.
Whatever dredges up from their
unconscious I'll accept, and treat as 'normal'.
If I seized on the content of
scenes as revealing secrets about the student, then I'd be perceived as
a threat. They'd have to 'love' me, or
'hate' me. I'd have negative and positive
transference states to contend with---which would be a
hindrance.

Once you decide to ignore content it becomes possible to understand
exactly what a narrative is, because you can concentrate on
_structure_.

My dictionary says a story is 'a sequence of events that have, or are
alleged to have happened, a series of events that are or might be
narrated . .
.
a person's account of his life or
some portion of it . .
.
a narrative of real or, more
usually, fictitious events, designed for the entertainment of the hearer
. .
.'
and so on.
Even a small child knows that a
story isn't just a series of events, because he says 'And is that the
end?' If we say 'A story is a series of
events that might be narrated' then we beg the question, which is: 'Why
do we narrate one series of events but not
another?'

[I
had to decide what a story was, and present a theory that an improviser
could use on the spur of the moment in any situation.
Obviously, the 'seventeen basic
plots' approach would be too limiting.
I needed a way to handle anything
that cropped up.]

Suppose I make up a story about meeting a bear in the forest.
It chases me until I come to a
lake. I leap into a boat and row across
to an island. On the island is a hut.
In the hut is a beautiful girl
spinning golden thread. I make passionate love to the girl
. .
.

I am now 'storytelling' but I haven't told a
_story_.
Everyone knows it isn't finished.
I could continue forever in the
same way: Next morning I am walking around the island when an eagle
seizes me and carries me high into the sky.
I land on a cloud and find a path
leading to Heaven. To one side of the path I notice a
lake with three swans. One of the swans suddenly
disappears, and an old man stands in his place .
.
.

The trouble with such a sequence is that there's no place where it can
stop, or rather, that I can stop _anywhere_; you are unconsciously
waiting for another activity to start, not free association, but
_reincorporation_.

Let's begin the story again: I escape from a bear by rowing across to
an island. Inside a hut on the island is a
beautiful girl bathing in a wooden tub.
I'm making passionate love to her
when I happen to glance out of the window.
If I now see the bear rowing
across in a second boat, then there was some point in mentioning him in
the first place. If the girl screams 'My lover!'
and hides me under the bed, then
this is better storytelling, since I've not only reintroduced the bear,
but I've also linked him to the girl.
The bear enters the hut, unzips
his skin, and emerges as the grey old man who makes love to the girl.
I creep out of the hut taking the
skin with me so that he can't change back into a bear.
I run down to the shore and row
back to the mainland, towing the second boat behind me (reintroducing
the boats). Then I see the old man paddling
after me in the tub. He seems incredibly strong and
there's no escape from him. I wait for him among the
trees, and pull the bearskin around myself.
I become a bear and tear him to
pieces---thus I've reincorporated both the man and the skin.
I row back to the island and find
the girl has vanished. The hut has become very old and
the roof is sagging in, and trees that were young saplings are now very
tall. Then I try to remove the skin and
I find it's sealed up around me.

At this point a child would probably say 'And is that the end?'
because clearly some sort of
pattern has been completed. Yet at no time
[have
I thought about the ]_content_ of the scene.
I presume it's about sexual
anxieties and fear of old age, or whatever.
Had I 'known' this, then I
wouldn't have constructed that particular story, but as usual the
content has looked after itself, and anyway is only of interest to
critics or psychologists. What matters to me is
the ease with which I 'free-associate' and the skill with which I
reincorporate.

Here's a 'good night' story made up by me and Dorcas (age
six).

'What do you want a story about?'
I
asked.

'A little bird,' she said.

'That's right. And where did this little bird
live?'

'With Mummy and Daddy bird.'

'Mummy and Daddy looked out of the nest one day and saw a man coming
through the trees. What did he have in his
hand?'

'An axe.'

'And he took the axe and started chopping down all the trees with a
white mark on. So Daddy bird flew out of the
nest, and do you know what he saw on the bark of his
tree?'

'A white mark.'

'Which meant?'

'The man was going to cut down their
tree.'

'So the birds all flew down to the river.
Who did they
meet?'

'Mr Elephant.'

'Yes. And Mr Elephant filled his trunk
with water and washed the white mark away from the tree.
And what did he do with the water
left in his trunk?'

'He squirted it over the man.'

'That's right. And he chased the man right out of
the forest and the man never came
back.'

'And is that the end of the
story?'

'It is.'

At the age of six she has a better understanding of storytelling than
many university students. She links the man to the
birds by giving him an axe. She links up the water
left in the trunk with the woodcutter, whom she remembers we'd shelved.
She isn't concerned with content
but any narrative will have some (about insecurity, I
suppose).

I say to an actress, 'Make up a story.'
She looks desperate, and says, 'I
can't think of one.'

'Any story,' I say. 'Make up a silly
one.'

'I can't,' she despairs.

'Suppose I think of one and you guess what it
is.'

[At
once she relaxes, and it's obvious how very tense she
was.]

'I've thought of one,' I say, 'but I'll only answer "Yes", "No", or
"Maybe".'

She likes this idea and agrees, having no idea that I'm planning to say
'Yes' to any question that ends in a vowel, 'No' to any question that
ends in a consonant, and 'Maybe' to any question that ends with the
letter 'Y'.

For example, should she ask me 'Is it about a horse?'
I'll answer 'Yes' since
'hors*e*' ends in an
'E'.

'Does the horse have a bad le*g*?'

'No.'

'Does it run awa*y*?'

'Maybe . .
.'

She can now invent a story easily, but she doesn't feel obliged to be
'creative', or 'sensitive' or whatever, because she believes the story
is _my_ invention.
She no longer feels wary, and open
to hostile criticism, as of course we all are in this culture whenever
we do anything spontaneously. Her first question
is:

'Has the story got any people in
it?'

'No.'

'Has it got animals in it?'

'No.'

'Has it got buildings in it?'

'Yes.' (I'm having to drop my rule about
consonants, or she'd get too
discouraged.)

'Does the building have anything to do with the
story?'

'Maybe.'

'Does it have aeroplanes in it?'

'No.'

'Fish?'

'No.'

'Insects?'

'Yes.'

'Do the insects play a large part in the
story?'

'Maybe.'

'Do they live underground?'

'No.'

'Do they start out as harmless?'

'No.'

'Do the insects take over the
world?'

'Yes.'

[' Are
they as big as elephants?']

'No.'

'Do they take any poison?'

'No!'

'Is it a gradual process, this taking over of the
world?'

'No.'

'Were there many insects?'

'No.'

'Do the insects gain anything by destroying the
world?'

'Yes.'

'Do they reign utterly alone?'

'Yes.'

'Do they destroy the world in a foul
manner?'

'No.'

'Does the story begin with their
existing?'

'No.'

'But there aren't any people in this bloody story.
So it must start with the insects.
Have the insects been reigning
alone in the world for a long
time?'

'Yes.'

'Do they live in the buildings that used to be the people's buildings?'
'Yes.'

'And then they suddenly decide to destroy the
world?'

'Yes.'

'And they don't die. And when they eat everything in
sight they become larger?'

'Yes.'

'And then they can't fit into the buildings
again?

'Yes.'

'And is that the end of the
story?'

'It is.'

If she got more than two 'Nos' in a row I sometimes said 'Yes' to
encourage her, and in the end I said 'yes' all the time because she was
getting discouraged. We used to play this game at
parties, and people who claim to be unimaginative would think up the
most astounding stories, so long as they remained convinced that they
weren't _responsible_ for them.
The great joke was to lure
somebody into inventing a story about a midget dentist sexually
assaulting Siamese twins, or whatever, wait until he accused you of
having really perverted minds, and then explain triumphantly that he had
created the story himself. Faubion Bowers once
wrote an article on this game, in, I think,
_Playboy_.

[To
some extent such stories are due to chance, but you can see in the last
example that a story is struggling to get out.
She doesn't ask 'Are the insects
harmless?', she says 'Do they start out as harmless?'
so that you know she has the
intention of creating some destructive force.
She also wants them to be big.
She says 'Are they as big as
elephants?' and gets the answer 'No,' but she
still ends up getting them gigantic, since they eat so much that they
can't fit into the buildings. She's been lured into
constructing one of the basic myths of our culture, the apparently
harmless force that destroys the environment---and itself.
Notice how she shapes the story by
recapitulation. She links the buildings and the
insects, and she reintroduces the buildings again at the end.
She says, 'Is that the end?'
because she knows she's linked up
the story. It must be obvious that when
someone insists that they 'can't think up a story', they really mean
that they 'won't think up a story'---which is OK by me, so long as they
understand it's a refusal, rather than a 'lack of
talent'.]

**2**

The improviser has to be like a man walking backwards.
He sees where he has been, but he
pays no attention to the future. His story can take him
anywhere, but he must still 'balance' it, and give it shape, by
remembering incidents that have been shelved and reincorporating them.
Very often an audience will
applaud when earlier material is brought back into the story.
They couldn't tell you why they
applaud, but the reincorporation does give them pleasure.
Sometimes they even cheer!
They admire the improviser's
grasp, since he not only generates new material, but remembers and makes
use of earlier events that the audience itself may have temporarily
forgotten.

It seems obvious to teach storytelling as two separate activities.
I get the actors to work in pairs,
with Actor A telling a story for thirty seconds, and then with Actor B
finishing it for thirty seconds. Actor A is to provide
disconnected material, and Actor B is somehow to connect
it.

A: It was a cold winter's night.
The wolves howled in the trees.
The concert pianist adjusted his
sleeves and began to play. An old lady was
shovelling snow from her door . .
.

B: . .
.
When she heard the piano the
little old lady began shovelling at fantastic speed.
When she reached the
[concert
hall she cried, 'That pianist is my son!'
Wolves appeared at all the
windows, and the pianist sprang on to the piano, thick fur growing
visibly from under his clothes.]

Or again:

A: An old lady sits in her lighthouse very worried because the sea has
dried up and there are no ships for her light to warn.
In the middle of the desert a tap
has been dripping since the beginning of time.
In the heart of the jungle, in a
little hut, an old man sits cross-legged .
.
.

B: . .
.
'I can't stand that dripping
sound,' he cries, leaping up and making a great journey to the centre of
the desert. Nothing he can do will stop the
tap dripping. 'At least I can turn it on,' he
cries. Immediately the desert flourishes,
the seas fill up again, and the old lady is very happy.
She travels to the jungle to thank
the old man, and ever afterwards keeps a picture of him and his hut
above the mantelpiece in the
lighthouse.

And again:

A: A man sits in a cave surrounded by pieces of bicycles.
There is a fire outside the cave,
and a woman is sending up smoke signals.
Some children are playing in the
river. An aeroplane passes over the
valley and breaks the sound barrier .
.
.

B: . .
.
The sonic boom makes the children
look up. They see the smoke signals.
'Daddy mended the bicycles,' they
shout. When they run back to the cave a
strange sight meets their eyes: not bicycles, but a flying-machine made
out of all the pieces. Leaping on, they all pedal into
the air, and fly around the valley all
day.

Sometimes Actor A will try to make it 'easy' for Actor B.
This actually makes it more
difficult.

A: There was a little old lady in Putney who ran a fish-and-chip shop.
All the people liked her,
especially the local cats, because she used to give them scraps of fish.
Also she didn't charge much, not
to poor people, so they saved up and bought her a birthday present .
.
.

[B:
There's nothing for me to do. She's joined it all up
herself.]

Me: True!

I'm not saying that this method produces great literature, but you can
get people inventing stories who previously claimed they could never
think of any.

Once people have learned to play each stage of this game with no effort
or anxiety, I let them play both halves themselves.
I say 'Free-associate', and then
when they've produced unconnected material, I say 'Connect', or
'Reincorporate'.

A knowledge of this game is very useful to a writer.
First of all it encourages you to
write whatever you feel like; it also means that you look
_back_ when you get stuck,
instead of searching _forwards_.
You look for things you've
shelved, and then reinclude them.

If I want people to free-associate, then I have to create an
environment in which they aren't going to be punished, or in any way
held responsible for the things their imagination gives them.
I devise techniques for taking the
responsibility away from the personality.
Some of these games are very
enjoyable and others, at first encounter, are rather frightening; people
who play them alter their view of themselves.
I protect the students, encourage
them and reassure them that they'll come to no harm, and then coax them
or trick them into letting the imagination off its
leash.

One way to bypass the censor who holds our spontaneity in check is to
distract him, or overload him. I might ask someone to
write out a paragraph on paper (without premeditation) while counting
backwards aloud from a hundred. I'll try it now as I'm
typing:

'Extra. I fall through the first storey of
the car park. The driver throughout the night
thought the soft concrete slit his genitals thoughtfully.
Nurse Grimshaw fell further .
.
.'

I got to sixty until I felt my brain was going to explode.
It's like trying to write after a
severe concussion. Try it.
It's very surprising to see what
something in you 'wants' to write when it gets the
chance.

You might try drawing a picture with two hands at once.
The trick is to keep your
attention equally divided, rather than switching quickly from hand to
hand. Also you shouldn't decide what to
draw; just sit down with a blank mind and draw as quickly as possible.
This regresses your mind to about
five years of age. Curiously, each hand seems to draw
with the same level of skill.

**3**

**Lists**

If I tell a student, 'Say a word', he'll probably gawp.
He wants a context in which his
answer will be 'right'. He wants his answer to
bring credit to him, that's what he's been taught answers are
for.

'Why can't you just say whatever comes into your
head?'

'Yes, well, I don't want to speak
nonsense.'

'Any word would have done. A spontaneous reply is
never nonsense.' This puzzles
him.

'All right,' I say, 'just name me a list of objects, but as quick as
you can.'

'Er . .
.
cat, dog, mouse, trap, dark cellar
. .
.'

He trails off, because he feels that the list is somehow revealing
something about himself. He wants to keep his
defences up. When you act or speak
spontaneously, you reveal your real self, as opposed to the self you've
been trained to present.

Nonsense results from a scrambling process, and takes time.
You have to consider your thought,
decide whether it gives you away, and then distort it, or replace it
with something else. The student's 'trap' and 'dark
cellar' were threatening to release some anxiety in him.
If he'd continued with the list,
speaking as quickly as possible, he'd have revealed himself as not quite
so sane and secure as he pretends.
I'll try typing out some nonsense
as fast as I can and see what I
get.

'The lobster bites the foot. Freda leaps skyward,
back falling prone on to the long breakwater.
Archie Pellingoe the geologist
leaping up around down and upon her lovingly chews her alabaster
sandwich . .
.'

This is still partly scrambled, because I can't type quickly enough.
I managed to censor some of it,
but I wasn't able to remove all the sexual content.
I veered away from the lobster
suspecting the image to be vaguely erotic, but it got worse.
The only way I could have made it
meaningless would be to type more slowly, and to substitute other
images. This is what my students do all
the time. I ask them for an idea and they
say '. .
.
oh .
.
.
aahh .
.
.
um .
.
.'
as if they couldn't think of one.
The brain constructs the universe
for us, so how is it possible to be 'stuck' for an idea?
The student hesitates not because
he doesn't have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that
arrive uninvited.

[I
make my students improvise lists of objects to make them understand that
there are two processes they can use.
You can make rational jumps from
one object to the next: 'Dog, cat, milk, saucer, spoon, fork .
.
.'
or you can improvise a
non-associative list. I'll type out one as quickly as I
can. 'Duck, rhomboid, platypus,
elephant's egg, cactus, Johnnie Ray, clock face, East Acton .
.
.'
It's like emptying all sorts of
garbage from your mind that you didn't know was there.
Try it.
It's more difficult than you
think, but it stops people caring what comes out of their minds.
I'll try again.
'Dead nun, postbox,
cat-o-nine-tails, cement hopper, mouse-juice, Pope Urban the Eighth, a
blob, giant opera singer, piece of lettuce, a kazoo, a vivisected clown,
a lump of interstellar dust, limpet shell, moving lava, red minibus,
stamen, sickle-cell anaemia . .
.']

A sequential list feels like one you 'think up'.
A non-sequential list seems to
arrive by itself. One day I'm sure there'll be an
explanation for the two processes.
Students choose the first way, and
have to be coaxed into attempting the second.
They feel as if they're being
bombarded with the thoughts of someone else.
They can't understand why such
bizarre lists should occur to them.
I tell them that it's perfectly
natural, and that hypnagogic images come in the same
way.

**Associating Images**

One of the earliest games we played at the studio involved associating
images. We developed it from
word-association games and we found that if someone gives an image
suddenly, this will automatically trigger off another image in his
partner's mind. Someone says 'A lobster .
.
.'
and someone answers 'With a flower
in its claw', and the juxtaposition does imply a content: 'A torn
photograph . .
.'
'.
.
.
An empty room'; 'Basket of eggs .
.
.'
'.
.
.
Cement mixer'.
Afterwards you can see that a
lobster with a flower in its claw is a good symbol of insensitivity, for
someone locked out of the world of feeling, and so on, yet none of these
associations were conscious at the moment that the pairing image jerked
out.

Here's some genuine nonsense assembled by C.
E.
Shannon and based on
word-probabilities:

'The head and frontal attack on an English writer that the character of
this point is therefore another method for the letters that the time of
whoever told the problem for an unexpected .
.
.'
and so on.
This is
_not_ the sort of thing
spewed out by the unconscious.

**[' Characters']**

One way to trigger off narrative material is to put the students in
groups of three, and have them invent a name for a character, and see if
they can agree on what he's like.
For
example.

'Betty Plum.'

'Big breasts.'

'Yes. A
barmaid.'

'Er . .
.'

'Well, she has worked as a barmaid .
.
.'

'Yes.'

'Lives in a room with blue
curtains.'

'A stuffed toy dog on the dresser .
.
.'

'Which she keeps her nightdress
in.'

'Nylon.'

The group continue until they know who she lives with, her taste in
music, her secret ambition, the sorrow in her life, etc.
The important thing is that the
students should _really_ agree, they shouldn't
just make compromises. As soon as one person disagrees
they wipe the character out, and start on another.
Soon they learn to develop a
character much further, and in a way that satisfies all of them.
'George Honeywell--- keeps
bees---smokes a pipe---married---_was_ married---in love with
the daughter of the tobacconist---wears a soft cap---he's a
voyeur---likes dogs . .
.'
And so
on.

**Automatic Writing**

Automatic writing is one way of getting students to understand that
there is 'something inside them besides themselves'.
Normally this skill is rare, but I
have invented a method that works for most people; actually I suppose I
should call it 'automatic reading'.
Here's how I coaxed a poem from a
volunteer at a public lecture.

'Mime taking a book from a shelf,' I
said.

'Yes.'

'What colour is it?'

'Blue.'

'Did you have to think up the colour or did you see
it?'

'It was blue.'

'Open it at the flyleaf. Can you see the name of
the publisher?'

'It's faint.'

'Spell it.'

'H . .
.
o .
.
.
d .
.
.
Hodson.'

'And the name of the book?'

'_In_ .
.
.'

'Yes.'

'_The_ .
.
.'

'Yes . .
.
try to spell
it.'

'C . .
.
_country_.'

'_In the
Country_ .
.
.
author?'

'Alex . .
.
ander
Pope.'

'Open it till you come to a page of verse.
What's the page
number?'

'Thirty-nine.'

'Find me a line of verse.'

'So that we . .
.'

'Are you seeing it or inventing
it?'

'Seeing it.'

'Next word.'

'It's blurred.'

'I've given you a magnifying-glass .
.
.'

I continued drawing the poem out of her, until she'd 'read' two verses.
Then I stopped because she was
finding the experience frightening.
So did the audience, because it
really didn't seem to be a poem _she_ was inventing, yet
someone was inventing it.

So that we can be happy

Together in our loves

Since you were away

I have been alone.

Having been so close

I cannot live again

Many years will pass

Till I live again.

The personality will often try to resist this method by saying 'It's in
Russian', or 'It's too tiny to read the print', and so on.
I say 'There's something written
in English in the margin' or 'I'm shrinking you down to the size of the
book', or something suitable. It's easy to switch from
'automatic reading' to my form of 'automatic writing'.
You just look at a blank sheet of
paper, and 'see' a word, and then write it where you 'saw' it.
I've filled many exercise books
using this method, partly to see where it led me, and partly to know
what happens if you go past the point where you feel impelled to stop.
I've learned a lot about myself
this way. Again there's a great gap between
what I would choose to write, and what actually emerges.
Here's a bit that sounds like a
statement about the imagination.

[The
great dragon dare not stir]

The trainer watches kindly but

At the slightest movement taps it on the
nose

The eyes glint fire and yet the muscles
dare

Not exert themselves nor let the flame burst
forth

Which would engulf the city in one
flash.

The trainer speaks of kindness and
consoles

And says he is the dragon's only
friend

Sometimes the dragon purrs but oh the
pain

Of never moving those enormous
limbs.

Here's another one, not at all like 'my'
writing.

_Windmills_

The vanes split apart

All the mechanism rusts

Growing children talk

Words turn to dust.

Look where the ocean

Clogged with oil stands

Still struggling seabird

Below on black sand.

Where on the headland

Does a lighthouse blaze now?

The endless waves mount

Desire fails below.

**'Dreams'**

A game we got from America uses relaxation to bypass the censor.
It's used by psychologists, and
I've seen dire warnings about other people using it.
Most psychologists who use games
rely very heavily on the discoveries of people working in the theatre,
and my guess is that the 'guided dream' came from the theatre in the
first place. (Frederick Perls says he was once
a pupil of Max Reinhardt!) Anyway, I think the warnings are due to the
same kind of fear that Mask work and hypnosis inspire.
It's true that if someone is
hovering on the edge of insanity one little push may topple him over,
but a bus trip can be just as disturbing as anything that happens in a
theatre class.

If I get you to lie down, close you eyes and relax, and report what
[your
imagination gives you, then you'll probably go into a deep state of
absorption, and instead of 'thinking things up' the experiences will
seem to be really happening to you.
Afterwards, if I ask 'Did you feel
the floor?' then you'll probably say, 'There
wasn't any floor.' If I say, 'did you experience your
body?' you'll probably answer, 'I wasn't
in my body' or 'I was in the body I had in the
story.']

I begin by suggesting something like 'You're on a
beach?'

'Yes.'

'Is it sandy or stony?'

'Sandy.'

'Did you think that up?'

'No, I just knew.'

It's very likely that the student will want to stay on the beach and
not be moved. I ask if he can see anything, or
anyone, but he'll usually be alone.
I tell him he's lain on the beach
a long time, and then I suggest that he moves to the water, or away from
it. If I don't tell him he's been
there a long time, he'll probably refuse to 'get up'.
The sort of story I'll expect to
get may involve him walking along the shore, passing a cave.
I may suggest he looks in the
cave, or wades into the ocean, but probably he'll prefer to go on
walking. Maybe he walks up to the top of
the cliffs and looks down. Then I stop
him.

Most people will have a good experience with this game, and sometimes
it's like paradise. It can also be pretty hellish.
I watch their breathing, and if
they seem alarmed I take them out, or steer them towards something less
alarming. I coax them near to threatening
areas: I'll suggest they enter the cave or swim in the ocean, but I
won't push them.

Once the basic technique is mastered, I let students try it again.
This time they'll be bolder.
They'll encounter other people,
they'll have adventures, but I'll still guide them away from 'bad
trips'. I'm using the game to demonstrate
to the student that he can be effortlessly creative, not to teach him
that his imagination is terrifying and should be suppressed!
People can get upset playing the
game, but if they weep you can cuddle them, which makes them feel
better. When people abreact I always
establish that (1) it's good for them; (2) they'll feel marvellous in
half an hour; (3) it 'happens to
everybody'.

Advanced students, whom you know well, may want to set off on deeper
and more fearful journeys. That's all right when
they know what they're doing. One way is to have them
cuddled by other students while they play the game.
If they start to express great
alarm, take them out, be calm, tell them to open their eyes, rock them
if necessary. Two
[people
can go on a journey together, each trying to have the same fantasy.
The essential thing is not that
the student should abreact, but that he should have the experience of
imagining something 'effortlessly', and 'choicelessly'.
He should understand through this
game that he doesn't have to ]_do_ anything in order to
imagine, any more than he needs to
_do_ anything in order to
relax or perceive.

Here's a dream in which I was the questioner, and the 'victim' a drama
student.

'What sort of stories do you
like?'

'Science fiction. Well .
.
.
Tolkien, Stories like
_The
Hobbit_.'

'OK. Imagine a lake surrounded by
mountains.'

'Yes.'

'You are swimming in the lake.'

'Yes.'

'Can you see any fish?'

'Yes.'

'Large ones?'

'No.'

'Shoals of little ones turning and
darting?'

'Yes.'

'There is one particular fish. What do you do with
it?'

'I catch it.'

'You swim back to the shore and three hooded figures are waiting for
you. What do you give
them?'

'The fish.'

'And what do they give you in
exchange?'

'A stick.'

'What do you do with it?'

'I point it at an oak tree and it
vanishes.'

'And then?'

'I point it at the three hooded figures and they vanish
too.'

'You set out through the woods. Does the path lead up or
down?'

'Up.'

'What do you hear? Is it from your right or your
left?'

'Left. Someone
crying.'

'You look down into a clearing and see a woman surrounded by .
.
.?'

'Little men.'

'What's she wearing? Anything?'

'She's naked.'

'The little men see you?'

'They're coming at me waving
sticks.'

[' The
woman calls to them?']

'She says it's not me who did
it.'

'Was it someone from the
castle?'

'Yes, he threw her out naked into the
forest.'

'Do you help her?'

'Yes.'

'Do you go up the path?'

'I put my cloak round her and we set off to the
castle.'

'It gets dark?'

'Yes.'

'And you are going to sleep?'

'We cover ourselves with leaves and we lie about eight feet
apart.'

'You're fast asleep when you wake up to feel her touching
you.'

'Yes.'

'What's she after?'

'The stick.'

'Does she get it?'

'Yes.'

'She points it at you and what
happens?'

'It goes all grey and wintry.'

'What do you see in the mist?'

'A huge oak tree, and three hooded figures leaping about and
shouting.'

At this point the story has obviously ended (because of a brilliant
reincorporation), and we roll about on the floor roaring with laughter.
We're very pleased to have
co-operated so effortlessly.

You'll notice that my suggestions are mostly in the form of questions.
He said 'Yes' to most of them,
because we had a good rapport, and I knew what to ask.
Such 'dreams' are intensely
_real_ to the person lying
down, and pretty vivid to the questioner.
This happened years ago, but I
still have the 'vision' of the story sharp in my mind.
I could easily draw illustrations
to every part of it. To be a good questioner you have
to enter something like the same trance state as the person
answering.

**'Experts'**

When Vahktangov, one of Stanislavsky's favourite pupils, was directing
_Turandot_ he asked the wise men
to set themselves impossible problems.
When they were onstage they were
always to be secretly trying to solve problems like 'How do you make a
fly the size of an elephant?'

[I
adapted this idea to use in 'interviews'.
One actor plays a TV interviewer,
and his partner becomes an 'expert' who has to convince us that he's an
authority on his subject.]

The best way to think up the questions is to start a sentence without
knowing how it's going to end. You say: 'Good evening .
.
.
We are fortunate enough to have
Professor Trout in the studio with us, who has just returned from Africa
where he has been teaching hippopotamuses to .
.
.'
You have no idea what to say next,
but almost anything will do: '. .
.
to do handstands' or '.
.
.
to yodel'.
If you try to 'think up'
impossible questions, it's very difficult.
Once you start the sentence 'How
do you turn a pig into . .
.'
it's very easy to conclude it '.
.
.
a fire
station.'

If you are asked, 'How do you teach hippopotamuses to knit?'
you are likely to hedge: 'Well
now, we have, as you know, a large number of these hippopotamuses which
the Government has assembled in the hope that they will eventually boost
Kenya's export trade. We're hoping to sell about ten
thousand pullovers a year soon.' You waffle on like that,
hoping that a nice idea will occur to you, but this isn't a good way of
really amazing an audience. It's much better to give
_any_ answer.
The interviewer's job is to hold
the 'expert' to the problem of
answering.

'Yes, but how exactly did you teach
them?'

'It was the carrot and the whip
really.'

'But what techniques?'

The 'expert' has agreed to answer the problem as part of the game, and
he understands that the interviewer is trying to help him in demanding
an immediate answer. Once he 'jumps in', and stops
hedging, the game is simple.

"Well I demonstrated the stitches.
Then I gave them sharpened
telegraph poles and about a mile of barbed
wire.'

'Didn't they have trouble holding on to the
poles?'

'Yes, well they would. They lack the opposed
thumb. They do have quite good
co-ordination though, and are very suited to activities of a repetitive
nature.'

'But how exactly did they hold the
poles?'

'Ah! Leather pole-holders strapped on
to the forearms, or, er, in common parlance,
feet.'

'But the pullovers, weren't they rather
uncomfortable?'

'Terrible. We were starting with barbed wire
and telegraph poles just to give them the general idea.
If you try with wool right away,
they keep snapping it.'

[' Quite.']

'It's all a matter of grading. You get 'em on to rope,
and then string, and finally they'll be doing
crochet.'

'Do you have any examples of their
work?'

'I'm wearing it. Every article of my clothing was
knitted by the Kilimanjaro Hippo Co-operative.'
(And so
on.)

It's a little difficult on the printed page to show how pleasurable the
game is. It's not so much what is said, but
the expert's eagerness to supply instant answers.
The audience know that
_they'd_ hedge, and beat about
the bush, and they have a great respect for a performer who doesn't try
any evasions. Sometimes such interviews are
hysterically funny. It's very good if the interview
refers to 'charts' that he imagines on the wall, and asks the 'expert'
to explain them, or if the activity can be demonstrated.
If you've been teaching mushrooms
to yodel, the interviewer can say, 'I believe you've brought some of
your soloists with you this evening.'
Anyone from the audience would
hastily deny this. It's so nice when the expert says
'Yes' and calls them in, or mimes taking them out of his
pocket.

**'Verbal Chase'**

Students can become better at playing 'Experts' if they play a 'verbal
chase' game first.

For example: Suppose I say 'Imagine a box.'
A student can predict that the
next thing I will say is something like 'What's in it?'
Instead I say 'Who put you in
there?' 'My father,' he says, anticipating
a further question like 'Why did he put you there?'
Instead I say 'What have you got
in there with you?' He replies 'A toilet'.
I don't know what he anticipates
now, but certainly not what I do say, which is 'What's written on the
outside of the box?' 'Ladies!'
he says, collapsing with
laughter.

We all laugh, I suppose because of the implied homosexuality.
If I were to point this out, then
the student would feel the need to guard against me.
Instead, I ignore the content, and
concentrate on trying to jerk the answers out of the student as quickly
as possible.

I say to another student: 'You're in a street.
What street are you in?'
'Main
street.'

'What's the shop?'

'A fishmonger's.'

'What does the fishmonger point at
you?'

'A pistol.'

'What comes out?'

[' Vinegar.']

Again everyone laughs and is very pleased.
Answering such questions is easy.
Asking them is very difficult,
because you have to change the 'set' of the questions each time.
Here's a sequence recorded in
connection with a TV show. I was working with a
girl student I'd just met for the first
time.

'Where are you?'

'Here!'

'You're not. Where are
you?'

'In a box.'

'Who put you there?'

'Mummy.'

'She's not really your mummy. Who is
she?'

'She's my aunt.'

'What's her secret plan?'

'To kill me.'

'What with?'

'A knife.'

'She sticks the knife where?'

This question freaks her, because it's so
sexual.

'In . .
.
in .
.
.
in my
stomach.'

'She cuts it open and takes out a handful of papery .
.
.'

'Boxes.'

'On the boxes is written . .
.?'

' "Help!" '

'Who wrote it?'

'I did.'

'Who's in the box? Crawling
out?'

'A spider.'

'A spider marked . .
.?'

' "YES".'

'The spider does what?'

'It eats me.'

'Inside the spider you meet?'

'My father.'

'Holding?'

'A . .
.
a .
.
.
a .
.
.
elephant.'

'By the . .
.'

'Tail.'

Everyone falls about with laughter, as if we'd been telling jokes, and
they understand that some of sequence has come to an end.
A student
[who
becomes an expert questioner, that is, who becomes very ingenious at
changing the 'set' of the questions, becomes a better improviser.
Speed is important, so that the
questions and answers are a little too fast for 'normal'
thought.]

Some questioners start doing all the work.
For
example:

'You're walking along a road.'

'Yes.'

'You meet a giant.'

'Yes.'

'You fall into a pool and are eaten by
crocodiles.'

'Yes.'

'Er . .
.
er .
.
.'

This could be rephrased, and would then
work.

'You're walking along---what?'

'A road.'

'A giant does what to you?'

'Throws me into a pond.'

'What do the crocodiles bite?'

The more 'insane' the questions, the better in jerking spontaneous
answers from the 'victim'.

**'Word at a Time'**

If I ask someone to invent the first line of a short story, he'll
unconsciously rephrase the question.
He'll tense up, and probably say
'I can't think of one.' He'll really act as if
he's been asked for a _good_ first line.
Any first line is really as good
as any other, but the student imagines that he's been asked to think up
dozens of first lines, then imagine the type of stories they might give
rise to, and then assess the stories to find the best one.
This is why he looks appalled and
mumbles '. .
.
oh .
.
.
dor .
.
.
um .
.
.'

Even if I ask some people for the first
_word_ of a short story
they'll panic and claim that they 'can't think of one', which is really
amazing. The question baffles them because
they can't see how to use it to display their 'originality' .
.
.
A word like 'the' or 'once' isn't
good enough for them.

If I ask one student for the first word of a story, and another for the
second word, and another for the third word, and so on, then we could
compose a story in this way:

'There' . .
.
'was' .
.
.
'a' .
.
.
'man' .
.
.
'who' .
.
.
'loved' .
.
.
'making' .
.
.
'people' .
.
.
'happy'.

One version of the game---which I still play occasionally---involved
[telling
a story around a circle as quickly as possible.
Sometimes we did it to a beat.
Anyone who 'blocked' we threw out
until only two people were left. You can make the game
tougher by having each person who speaks point to the person who is to
say the next word, there's no way to anticipate when your turn will
come.]

Anyone who tries to control the future of the story can only succeed in
ruining it. Every time you add a word, you
know what word you would like to follow.
Unless you can continually wipe
your ideas out of your mind you're paralysed.
You can't adapt to the words said
by other people.

'We . .
.
(went for a walk) .
.
.'

'Are . .
.
(nice people) .
.
.'

'Going . .
.
(to the circus) .
.
.'

'Away . .
.
(for a holiday) .
.
.'

'To . .
.
(the country) .
.
.'

'Explore . .
.
(the amazon) .
.
.'

'A . .
.
(cave) .
.
.'

'Giant!'

Once you say whatever comes to mind, then it's as if the story is being
told by some outside force. I wouldn't be surprised
to find that there are cultures which use the method as a form of
divination. The group learn that this method
of storytelling won't work unless they relax, stop worrying about being
'obvious' and remain attentive. I have played it in
darkened rooms with the group lying on their backs with their heads at
the centre of a circle. I remember at RADA we
once pulled curtains over ourselves and lay there like a huge pudding.
After the group has played the
game with their eyes shut, get them to walk about and observe any
perceptual changes. (Colours become brighter, people
and spaces seem of a different size, focus is sharper.) Our normal
thinking dulls perception, but the word-at-a-time game can shut some of
the normal screening off. (It's not a good game
for German speakers because of the rules about verbs coming at the
end!)

I divide students into groups of four and get them to compose 'letters'
a word at a time. They all relax and one of the
players writes the letter down. I was describing this
technique to an Eng. Lit.
graduate.

'I don't think I could ever learn such a game,' she
said.

'Try it,' I said, and wrote '89' at the top of a sheet of
paper.

'What's that?' she
asked.

'The beginning of the address.'

[' I
don't know what to put.']

This intelligent girl was suffering.
She was claiming to be
'uncreative' but was really just terrified she'd give something
away.

'You know how addresses start on
letters.'

'Well . .
.
all right.
"The".'

'Elms', I wrote.

'89 The Elms can't be an
address.'

'It'll do.'

'I can't think of anything else.
I've got a
block.'

I wrote 'block' down. Then I wrote
'Jan'.

'March' she said, looking
helpful.

I put an oblique stroke between 'Jan' and 'March'.
She looked as if she was under
great stress. She wanted to fail but didn't know
how to. She was afraid that the game might
make her reveal secret things about
herself.

'Dear', I wrote.

'Henry', she said after a long
pause.

'I.'

'Hope.'

'Mrs.'

'I don't know who to put.'

'Any name. There isn't any way to choose a
name that's wrong.'

'Exeter', she said, and seemed suddenly to realise that the game could
be fun. The completed 'letter' read like
this:

89 The Elms Block

Jan/March

Dear Henry,

I hope Mrs Exeter has been behaving well.
Mum hopes that you will take off
your bra. You will not proceed to any other
perversions. The Vicar says Mrs White is a cow.
Do you allow Mrs White to help you
go to the bathroom?

Yours sincerely,

Arthur

PS I hate you.

Not an inspired letter, but once she got over her initial resistance
she became fascinated by the game, and played it many
times.

Word-at-a-time letters usually go though four stages: (1) the letters
are usually cautious or nonsensical and full of concealed sexual
references; (2) the letters are obscene and psychotic; (3) they are full
of [religious
feeling; (4) finally, they express vulnerability and
loneliness.]

Improvisations go through similar stages if you don't censor them, and
if you work with the same group day after day.
Here is a sequence of 'letters'
which were written late one night, by three drama students (two boys and
a girl). They said it took them a couple of
hours, what with talking, and opening more beers, and so on.
I'd told them that the stories
changed if they persisted in writing them, but I hadn't told them what
to expect. They stopped when they were too
scared to write any more. You can see the 'armour'
peeling off letter by letter. Some of the paragraphs
have titles, which I think were arrived at by spelling them out a letter
at a time.

1. 'How did he walk on the water when
   it was raining? I don't think that God exists (in
   garbage cans). Polacks began to fix their
   dynamite to the end of their tools which shuddered and vibrated
   radically. "John is a prick," said Mary, "why
   can't he fuck my arse, the bastard!"
   Jeremy and Fiona lay in a
   compromising position with green and yellow forceps plucking their pubic
   hair which rustled like reeds in a storm which was raging then.
   Tomorrow we must go with Jane to
   old mansions and buy all the paraphernalia required for our happy
   transactions in the nuptial bed. Why did Mary pull
   Jeremy's trousers off his legs and burn with green fingers?
   She stroked his beard and began
   fondling his nosebag. It began to get warm in the
   greenhouse, plants wilted and detumesced.
   If the rain couldn't get into the
   trough all the plants would die.
   How will Mother walk when it
   begins raining?'

2. 'Because Mary felt ill, she went
   to the doctors. Did he feel reluctant to examine
   her? She couldn't pass water and fart
   when asked. "You may leave the basin on the
   table if water is spilling down your legs."
   I thought that we can perhaps
   catch ourselves in bed. Basins frighten ghosts
   and mice, but spiders walk around chairs and breathe softly.
   Can I hear myself breathe?
   Only God can produce Christ's
   image on church walls without seeming to characterise.
   If water falls gently on to the
   spider it will die. Tomorrow is Christ's birthday and
   we must celebrate with balloons and razors.
   Should we allow Christ to die?
   Perhaps he can save us, perhaps he
   can obliterate us. Fear is always present with me.
   God is dead.
   Big tits can make me feel happy,
   and saved. Mary and I are not related and can
   only marry if God permits. Why can't we live by
   ourselves?'

3. '_Purgation_.
   Lightning strikes trees but only
   when it rains hard. Water runs along green branches
   carrying specks of bird-shit. Clouds follow the sun
   which shines only on holidays. Thunder is loud but soft
   in rain. Why can trees blow their leaves
   towards the houses? Why does
   [rain
   trickle down my trees? I like rain when it splatters
   against my house and face. Should ghosts haunt my
   house? I would like it if God left me
   alone. Ghosts like butter, mice like
   ghosts, butter likes me. Poetry destroys all
   images and reincarnation. Why, why can't I live
   without people and Jesus and poetry?
   If it destroys me it destroys
   everything. Bombs destroy people.
   God and me.
   Are bombs created by God or are
   poets Gods, or is love a bomb which destroys
   rain?']

4. '_Autumn_.
   He walked through the trees
   carrying a body which bumped gently against the ground, which was hard
   and frozen. She held his hand, softly
   whispering "Dead!" Can't leaves drift under the
   bodies without breaking? Is Mother dying or has
   she died without screaming "Dead!"
   whispered Mary.
   He shook the leaves off Mother and
   began sprinkling dirt over her grave.
   After death will God see her face?
   Will Mother laugh at God or cry
   "Dead!"? Should we mourn her parting?
   Leaves tremble and fall swiftly.
   Time carries her scythe tenderly
   without cutting her throat. Leaves cut my heart, but
   Jesus cuts my mother. Between them their relationship
   seems brittle and lifeless like dead
   leaves.'

5. '_Love
   lost_.
   Sunshine brightens my life.
   Yesterday, today, tomorrow; all my
   loves have flown towards oblivion.
   Death approaches from lost loves.
   Is death the answer?
   Can Christ save lost lovers or do
   angels meet flying shadows under sunlit gardens?
   Black night frightens angels.
   Dark alleys frighten lovers.
   Only lovers know love and see
   nothing but sunshine. Perhaps death hides people from
   the heaven-sent sunshine, or love hides from death.
   When you travel through darkness,
   hold love tightly, for you will need all the strength of your love to be
   unafraid of death. Why should we not love again,
   though we may lose our lives from lost loves?
   Death cannot change us, or destroy
   us, while God loves lovers.'

6. 'Shipwrecks are dangerous to
   people on ships. Waves cause shipwrecks and are
   beautiful. How can beautiful waves destroy
   people without turning ugly? Jesus walks; untroubled
   footsteps sound across vast oceans of beautiful waves.
   Shipwrecks begin when love
   disappears. Jesus hears no footsteps, only the
   screams of the dying waves which patter his feet.
   Why do mermaids not hear God?
   Is death inevitable?
   Do shipwrecks begin when ears are
   hearing nothing but footsteps? Can I hear waves beating
   on nothing? Only if I make footsteps heard.
   Christmas comes when God is deaf
   to our screams, and waves become destructive and silent like Jesus's
   feet.'

7. '_Sabbat_.
   Seven dwarfs stood silently
   watching. Six leprechauns, being present at
   the funeral, began dancing. Five Jews scrabbled in
   [mud
   for money which the angels took. Three dwarfs raped two
   leprechauns, who said that one was
   enough.']

8. '_Hells I
   view_.
   Black shines brightly under white
   silk curtains, light filters through black windows but fades colours
   anyway. Windows shine at people from afar.
   Darkness surrounds me as I gaze at
   people in the street. Is my body there or am I looking
   at it through dark windows?'

9. '_Seagulls_.
   Look at the seagulls circling
   above this place, like shadows falling at noon.
   Wings are made for flying higher
   and higher and swifter and stronger than anything crawling below.
   How do birds know what it is like
   to be earthbound? Perhaps they envy creatures who
   crawl and swim. If I could fly, like them, at the
   end of autumn where leaves lie brown and decaying, then I would know
   that God is a being who flies.'

10. 'Snow is gentle and cold.
    It falls from above us.
    Death is only snow.
    It falls to cover our lives.
    But we cannot melt away death like
    sunshine melts snow. Coldness comes, only once the snow
    has fallen. _If I can melt my snow will also
    melt_, but because I am never fully
    warm I cannot live. Terror is cold.
    Fear is cold and only I can depend
    on heat. Love is warm.
    Ah!
    If only we had love always, we
    could conquer, and live forever. The people who love
    themselves cannot melt their snow.
    Only you can melt my snow, for our
    love can never fail, for however cold it becomes, we shall love each
    other and therefore melt each other's snows and live
    forever.'

11. 'Happiness is always transient.
    Perhaps we should try to be
    happier and better with our friends.
    Friendship is transient but
    transcience meets often with lasting friendship.
    Why can't we meet other people and
    make friendships last? Am I ever going to meet my friends
    in honest friendship? Or will we ever see our own
    friendships die through lack of love?
    Which is the better?
    I don't like to leave friends
    behind but friendship will come again.
    Love is permanent only when
    friendship and trust exists. If friendship is
    transient, trust must be the permanent basis of
    love.'

12. 'Strings vibrate when they feel
    varying pressures upon them. Sounds echo through
    empty buildings. Light shines brightly, but only
    enters through open spaces in walls.
    My room vibrates silently and
    darkly. No light enters my room.
    It feels no emotion, like a static
    building where strings never vibrate.
    I cannot live alone, listening to
    silence and seeing nothing but walls and darkness.
    Why does light not enter my room?
    Must I feel deaf to vibrating
    strings and see nothing? Where am I, where are
    you? Where are the people who play
    music and [vibrate
    strings? When will I hear and see music?
    I can't tell.
    Only you can help me see and hear.
    I only live, hoping that you love
    me. Give me your hand, and take away
    my darkness and silence.']

13. 'Summer roses die when winter
    strangles the ground. Weeds flourish when roses die.
    I lived in a thorn bush until
    roses began to die, then I left my thorn bush and ran towards the sun.
    I felt it warm my body as I had no
    clothes on. Approaching dusk saw me shiver,
    but I still ran towards the sun, and finally dropped towards the end of
    life. Roses covered by body.
    Dawn came and warmed the roses and
    me. Then at noon I burned.
    My body could not feel pain.
    I stood among the flourishing
    roses. They did not burn.
    Midnight came.
    I tried to return to my thorn bush
    but I was cold. If I cannot grow into a rose, I
    must die, and become a weed.'

14. 'Walls encircle me.
    My heart has walls which surround
    my blood, beating steadily and relentlessly it pushes through my veins
    because I am so alive. Talk to me please.
    The walls are thin and crumbling.
    Life is being drained from within
    my body. Stop the current.
    I must break through the walls
    which hold my body. Death will soon release the aching
    heart, but I am not afraid. Here is my heart, now
    take a piece and smash down my
    walls.'

If you play this game with children, then it's important not to insist
on _leading_.
Here's a 'story' I improvised with
a 'disturbed' nine-year-old boy. His words are in
italics, and you can see how little I
contributed.

'A _year_ ago
_strangely_ enough
_dead_ people
_strangled_ my
_mother_.
How
_did_ they
_do_ this?
"_Help!_" cried
_Thing-a-me-boober_, "I
_went_ over
_Heaven_ and
_Hell_, where
_did_ you
_stop_?"
Hell
_is_ the
_ugliest_ place
_I_ have
_ever_ seen.
_Devil_ George
_swims_ through
_waves_ of
_flame_ to
_strengthen_ his
_bones_.
Mother
_screamed_ when
_she_ saw
_George_ holding
_a_ stick
_called_ a
_pitchfork_.
She
_fainted_ when
_my_ friend
_hit_ her
_over_ the
_head_ with
_a_ bucket
_of_ molten
_metal_.
Meanwhile,
_back_ in
_my_ own
_Casbah_ I
_got_ very
_drunk_.'

A game can stare you in the face for years before you 'see' it.
It wasn't until I'd left the
studio that I though of asking students to act the stories out as they
told them.

I get the actors to work in pairs, with their arms round each other, to
say 'We' instead of 'I', and to use the present tense.
I discourage them from putting in
adjectives, or saying 'But'. It's normal for them to
encounter something unpleasant, and to hold it off with adjectives by
saying 'We . .
.
met .
.
.
a .
.
.
big .
.
.
huge .
.
.
terrifying .
.
.
angry .
.
.
black .
.
.
monster .
.
.
_but_ .
.
.
we .
.
.
escaped.'
Once they've
[mastered
the basic technique of the game (which is very easy) then I forbid them
to escape from the monsters. 'Kill it or be killed,'
I say, 'or make friends with it, outwit it.'
I remind them that there isn't
really a monster, so what does it matter if they allow themselves to be
torn apart? If they get eaten or killed I say
'Go on, don't stop the game.' Then they can fight
their way out of the monster, or continue in heaven, or whatever.
They can mime sitting astride
enormous turds and paddle through the intestines.
If they get to heaven they can
find God is missing and take over the place, or arm-wrestle him, or
anything.]

The audience can hardly believe that it's possible to improvise scenes
in this way, and they're delighted to see actors working in such
sympathy. I used to ask the audience for
titles first, and I usually combined two titles to make one; the actors
would then improvise _Dracula and the Bald Lighthouse
Keeper_, or
_Rin- Tin-Tin and the Fall of the
Roman Empire._

Some people avoid getting involved in action.
All they'll produce is stories
like _'We-are-going-to-the-market-where-we-buy-bread-and-now-we-walk-to-the-beach-where-we-watch-the-seagulls
. .
.'_ It's a good idea to
start such people off inside a womb, or on another planet, or being
hunted for murder, or some other dramatic
situation.

The game can be intensified by having one partner close his eyes, while
the other partner stops him from bumping into the furniture.
In another version both partners
close their eyes, while the group stand round them and protect them.
If the group is in a good state,
that is to say warm and friendly, then they'll begin to add things to
the story. If a wind is mentioned the group
will spontaneously make wind noises, or perhaps flap coats around them
to make a draught. If the storytellers are in the
forest, then bird sounds will be made, or rustlings.
Soon the group begin to dictate
parts of the action, providing encounters with animals or monsters.
An extraordinary energy is
released, an almost sinister excitement sweeps over the group, and all
sorts of sensitivity exercises are discovered.
The group will 'fly' the story
tellers, and bury them in heaps of bodies or be 'spiders' crawling all
over their skins.

It's amazing to be one of the 'storytellers' because everything becomes
so real for you. Once your eyes are shut, and
you're involved in the story, and people begin to supply even very
approximate effects, the brain suddenly links it all up, and fills in
the gaps. If someone touches your face with
a wet leaf you hallucinate a whole forest, you know what kind of trees
are there, the type of animals, and so
on.

[One
extraordinary way to play word-at-a-time games is to ask a whole group
to tell the story, all speaking together.
I don't know how to convince you
that this is possible, but most groups can succeed at it, if you
approach them at the right moment.
Start with everyone pressed
together, and say 'Start with "We" and all speak at the same time.'
I suppose it works because many
people say the same words, and the minority who go 'wrong' are swamped
out by the majority.]

**4**

**'Playwriting'**

An improviser can study status transactions, and advancing, and
'reincorporating', and can learn to free-associate, and to generate
narrative spontaneously, and yet still find it difficult to compose
stories. This is really for aesthetic
reasons, or conceptual reasons. He shouldn't really
think of making up stories, but of
_interrupting
routines_.

If I say 'Make up a story', then most people are paralysed.
If I say 'describe a routine and
then interrupt it', people see no problem.
A film like
_The Last
Detail_ is based on the routine of two
sailors travelling across America with a prisoner whom they have to
deliver to a prison. The routine is interrupted by
their decision to give him a good time.
The story I fantasised earlier
about the bear who chased me was presumably an interruption of the
routine. 'Walking through the forest'.
Red Riding Hood presents an
interruption of the routine 'Taking a basket of goodies to
Grandma'.

Many people think of finding more
_interesting_ routines, which
doesn't solve the problem. It may be interesting to
have a vet rectally examining an elephant, or to show brain surgeons
doing a particularly delicate operation, but these activities remain
routines. If two lavatory attendants break a
routine by starting a brain operation, or if a window cleaner begins to
examine the elephant, then this is likely to generate a narrative.
Conversely, two brain surgeons
working as lavatory cleaners immediately sounds like part of a story.
If I describe mountaineers
climbing a mountain, then the routine says that they first climb it, and
then they climb down, which isn't much of a story.
A film of a mountain climb isn't
necessarily anything more than a documentary.
If we interrupt the routine of
mountain-climbing by having them discover a crashed plane, or if we snow
them up and have them start eating each other, or whatever, then we
begin story-telling. As a story progresses it begins to
establish other routines and these in their turn have to be
[broken.
In the story about the bear I escaped to an island and began making love
to a beautiful girl. This can also be considered as a
routine that it's necessary to interrupt.
I interrupted it with the bear,
but I could have chosen one of an infinity of other ways.
I could have found that she was
wearing a wig to hide her complete baldness, or that I was impotent, or
that my penis was growing so long that it had made its way to the shore
of the lake where it was being attacked by the bear.
I could have discovered that she
was my sister---Maupassant set such a story in a
brothel.]

It doesn't matter how stupidly you interrupt a routine, you will be
automatically creating a narrative, and people will listen.
The scene in
_The
Tempest_ where Caliban hears the clown
coming works marvellously, but it's ludicrous.
The first routine suggests that
Caliban will defend himself, or leave.
He crawls under a sheet.
When the clown enters he sees this
monster hiding under the sheet. If we treat this as a
routine, then it's obvious that the clown runs away.
What he does is incredible---the
very last thing anyone would do is to crawl under the sheet beside the
monster. It's actually the
_best_ thing to do, since it
spectacularly breaks the routine.

We could introduce this concept by getting each actor in a scene to
prearrange something that'll surprise his partner.
In a scene where a couple are
about to go to bed, maybe the husband suddenly turns into a boot
fetishist, or maybe the wife will suddenly start to laugh hysterically,
or find she's growing feathers. If you set out to do
something in a scene that your partner can't anticipate, you
automatically generate a
narrative.

Sometimes stories themselves become so predictable that they become
routines. Nowadays if your princess kisses
the frog, it's probably better if she becomes a frog herself, or if the
frog she kissed just becomes six feet higher.
It's no good the knight killing
the dragon and deflowering the virgin any more.
Killing the virgin and deflowering
the dragon is more likely to hold the audience's
attention.

One way that storytellers wreck their talent is by
_cancelling_.
A student of mine wrote a scene in
which a girl friend messed up her ex-boy friend's apartment in an act of
revenge. He arrived and they had a row.
Once the row was over and she had
left, the playwright had a sensation of 'failure', or having done
_nothing_---which was true.
When I told the writer to consider
the row as a routine which needed to be broken, she wrote a scene in
which at the height of the row the girl suddenly injected the ex-boy
friend with a syringe, and locked herself in the bathroom.
One moment there was a row going
on, and [the
next the man was suddenly terrified of what she might have done to
him.]

Many students dry up at the moment they realise that the routine
they're describing is nearing its completion.
They absolutely understand that a
routine _needs_ to be broken, or they
wouldn't feel so unimaginative. Their problem is that
they haven't realised what's wrong
_consciously_.
Once they understand the concept
of 'interrupting routines', then they aren't stuck for ideas any
more.

Another way that improvisers screw themselves up is by moving the
action elsewhere. An improvisation starts with a
girl asking a boy for the time. He says it's four
o'clock. She says that the others are late,
and they begin talking about these imaginary others, and what happened
last time, and the scene fizzles out.
I tell them that they got diverted
into a discussion of events that happened another time, and that there
was nothing for the audience to see.
I start them again with the
opening dialogue. She asks what time it is.
He says, 'Four o'clock,' I shout
out: 'Say it's time to begin.' 'It's time to begin,' he
says. 'Must we?'
she asks.
He says, 'Well you know how strict
he is', and again they begin talking about something outside the scene.
I tell them I don't care what they
do so long as the action remains onstage.
'Get a bucket,' I say, and the
actor mimes carrying on a bucket.
'Is it really necessary?'
implores the actress.
'Yes,' he replies, 'open your
mouth, I'll put the funnel in.' 'I've put on twenty
pounds in the last week,' she complains.
'He likes them fat,' he says,
pouring the 'contents' of the 'bucket' into the 'funnel' while she
pretends to be swelling up. The scene now seems
inspired, and the audience are fascinated.
(Speke found this scene in
reality: a tribe where the king's wives were forcibly fed, and sprawled
about like great seals.)

One of the first games I used at the studio involved getting Actor A to
order Actor B about: 'Sit down. Stand up.
Go to the wall.
Yawn.
Say "I'm tired."
Look around.
Walk to the door .
.
.'
and so on.
We weren't trying to create
narratives; we only wanted the actors to get used to obeying each other,
and to ordering each other around.
This game (if you can call it a
game) exposed them to an 'audience' without their having to think about
success or failure.

Now that I'm teaching 'playwriting' in a Canadian university, I've
adapted this early game into a way of teaching narrative skills.
Two students obey a third who
tells them what to say and do. The third student, the
'playwright', will be under a certain amount of stress, but if he blocks
I tell him to say 'prompt', and then someone tells him what to say next.
We don't play the game in order to
get 'good stories', [although
'good stories' may emerge; the important thing is to investigate exactly
why the playwright 'blocks'.]

A playwright who gets his two students to wash up soon stops and says
'I can't think of anything.' If I say 'Break the
routine' he has one student break a plate on purpose.
He now has a quarrel which he can
develop for a while, but which is also a routine.
They decide to put the plate
together, and find a piece is missing.
They investigate and find a hold
in the floor. They peer through the hole and
start talking about what they see underneath.
The playwright then gets stuck
again. What he's done is to move the
action offstage, so I tell him he's been
_deflected_, and that he's to get
the action onstage again. He tells them to tear up
the floorboards, and the 'block'
dissolves.

An audience will remain interested if the story is advancing in some
sort of organised manner, but they want to see
_routines_ interrupted, and the
action continuing _between_ the actors.
When a Greek messenger comes in
with some ghastly story about events that have happened somewhere else,
the important thing is the effect the revelation produces on the other
characters. Otherwise it stops being theatre,
and becomes 'literature'.

A 'playwright' begins a story by saying: 'Dennis, sit on the chair, and
look ill. Betty, say "Are you feeling well?"
Dennis, say "No, could you get me
a glass of water." Betty, get Dennis a glass of
water. Drink it, Dennis.
Betty, say "How do you feel?".
Dennis, say "Much better now" . .
.'

At this point the 'playwright' becomes confused, so I stop him and
explain that he's _cancelled_ everything out.
He introduces the idea of
sickness, and then he removes it.
I take the story back to when
Dennis drinks the glass of water.
'Dennis, find that the water goes
right though you, and is splashing on the floor under the chair.
Betty, get him another glass of
water. Dennis, examine yourself to try to
work out what happened. Betty, give him the
water, and put the glass under the chair to catch it when it runs
through again. Dennis, say "Can you help me?".
Betty, say "You'll have to take your clothes off, then."
Dennis, mime undressing .
.
.'
And so on.
The level of invention is no
higher, but the story is no longer being
_cancelled_, and it holds the
attention.

There's nothing very profound about such stories, and they don't
require much imagination, but people are very happy to watch them.
The rules are: (1) interrupt a
routine; (2) keep the action _onstage_---don't get
_diverted_ on to an action that
has happened elsewhere, or at some other time; (3) don't
_cancel_ the
story.

**5**

I began this essay by saying that an improviser shouldn't be concerned
with content, because the content arrives automatically.
This is true, and also not true.
The best improvisers do, at some
level, know what their work is about.
They may have trouble expressing
it to you, but they do understand the implications of what they are
doing; and so do the audience.

I think of an improvisation we did years ago: Anthony Trent played
being a prisoner in a cell. Lucy Fleming arrived, I
don't remember how, and he endowed her with invisibility.
At first he was terrified, but she
calmed him down, and said she had come to rescue him.
She led him out of the prison and
as he stepped free he fell dead. It had the same kind of
effect as Ambrose Bierce's story _Incident at Owl Creek
Bridge_.

I remember Richardson Morgan playing a scene in which I said he was to
be fired, and in which he said he was failing at his work because he had
cancer. I think Ben Benison was the boss
and he treated Ric with amazing harshness.
It was about the cruellest scene
I've ever seen and the audience were hysterical with laughter.
I've never heard people laugh
more. The actors seemed to be dragging
all the audience's greatest fears into the open, laying out all their
insecurities, and the anxiety was releasing itself in waves of roaring,
tearing laughter, and the actors absolutely knew what they were doing,
and just how slowly to turn the
screw.

You have to trick students into believing that content isn't important
and that it looks after itself, or they never get anywhere.
It's the same kind of trick you
use when you tell them that they are
_not_ their imaginations,
that their imaginations have nothing to do with them, and that they're
in no way responsible for what their 'mind' gives them.
In the end they learn how to
abandon control while at the same time they exercise control.
They begin to understand that
everything is just a shell. You have to misdirect
people to absolve them of responsibility.
Then, much later, they become
strong enough to resume the responsibility themselves.
By that time they have a more
truthful concept of what they
are.