Cartoon de Salvo’s Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories
Friday, April 11th, 2008The Continuing Chronicle of ‘Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories’ on tour… www.cartoondesalvo.com
It’s Sunday 6th April, and my family and pals in Cardiff have assembled quite a throng for Cartoon de Salvo’s gig at the Wales Millenium Centre. They love going out to see a show and I’m coming home to play in our beautiful new major cultural building, which we all admire from their view over Cardiff Bay from the terraces of Penarth. Wales likes being proud, and today Cardiff have got through to the FA cup final in a historic victory, so all my family are proud of Cardiff, proud of WMC and proud of me for having a gig here. All 33 of them.
The thing is the show I’m in is Hard Hearted Hannah and Other Stories, and I haven’t got a single clue what’s going to happen tonight. I don’t know a line I’m going to say, I don’t even know whether I’m going to play a man or a woman, I don’t know if I will be shining in a gift of a role, or trudging through treacle with an accent I cannot do. I don’t know if my folks will like it. The fact that audiences seem to have loved this show at every gig so far on tour, and I’ve never felt like I’m trudging through treacle, doesn’t seem to stop me from being utterly terrified. In the dressing room, the boys (there are 3 of us) are cool, because they say: what is there to be afraid of, we can prepare for nothing and all we have to do is be prepared for anything. Freaks.
In the show, we played VIKINGS! We pillaged and bit off the heads of babies, we had a spirit guide and a hero quest, we had complex, tragic sexual relationships and curly shoes. And my folks loved it.
I should say how this comes to pass but I’m wondering where to start. The show is what they call ‘Long Form Impro’ (which we’ve decided isn’t very sexy for marketing as it contains both the words ‘long’ and ‘form’). There isn’t a very visible ‘long-form’ scene in the UK; here most people’s perceptions of impro are of gag-centred Whose Line is it Anyway?-type activity. I got turned onto it when I went to study with impro guru Keith Johnstone in San Francisco on an Arts Council grant some years ago. We’ve always had elements of impro in our devised shows, but I was blown away to discover a company over there called True Fiction Magazine working to tell an entire story in one night.
The Salvos always promised ourselves one day we’d take the plunge and do this, and last year we went out to train with them. What we’ve learnt has changed the way I think about being an actor and making theatre. And by necessity we are still learning, because one of the most important rules about impro – the neglect of which may have tripped up some troupes – is that as soon as you become good at it you have to shake it up, add challenges and keep it risky. Improbable Theatre’s Lee Simpson came in to work as an outside eye for a day on rehearsals of the show and he said gloomily; ‘It will never stop being terrifying’. Now I’m starting to become addicted to that pit of terror in my stomach.