In 1967 Keith Johnstone, who has died aged 90, formed an improvisation troupe, Theatre Machine, with the actors Ben Benison, Roddy Maude-Roxby, Richard Morgan and Anthony Trent. Starting as an educational demonstration of the techniques that Keith had developed while running the Royal Court Theatre Studio in London, the project soon developed into a variety evening of longer improvised playlets interspersed with short sketches. Keith acted as emcee, calling out prompts and suggestions to the improvisers.
With a new fringe theatre circuit an active part of the emerging counterculture, Theatre Machine were soon invited to festivals all over mainland Europe. Performing to audiences who did not always understand English, the group rapidly developed their skills in slapstick and clowning. When a critic from the Stage newspaper observed that the work of the company was too polished to be unscripted, he was invited back on a subsequent evening to prove that they were indeed making it all up.
The following year the principal of Rada, Hugh Cruttwell, invited Keith to begin teaching regular improvisation classes there. He proved instrumental in the training of a new generation of British actors, among them Jonathan Pryce.
The offer in 1972 of a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Calgary, Canada, gave Keith a stable salary and the chance to develop his work in well-resourced laboratory conditions. The two years soon passed: Keith eventually retired as professor emeritus in 1995.
With students from the university, in 1977 Keith founded the Loose Moose Theatre Company, their first shows performed in an old pumphouse converted into a flexible theatre space. Loose Moose showcased improvised and scripted theatre, producing many of Keith’s plays alongside those of others including Samuel Beckett, with whom Keith had struck up a friendship during his time at the Royal Court.
Inspired by British pro-wrestling and Keith’s decade-long dream of replacing wrestlers with improvisers, the company introduced Theatresports, in which teams of improvisers competed against each other in a series of impro challenges, with audiences encouraged to cheer on the teams as they might at a sports match. Teams were formed and international tournaments played over the next decade across Canada, the US, Europe and Australia, with large audiences turning up for “matches”, realising Keith’s vision of a truly popular theatre.
In a truncated form, Theatresports techniques were reflected in the TV game show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which during the 1980s and 90s became a success in both its British and American iterations. London’s Comedy Store Players continue to draw inspiration from Keith’s work.
As Theatresports took on a life of its own, often departing from Keith’s original intentions, he created a new, more reflective form of theatre, in which actors improvised key moments from a guest’s life. Working with Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson from the British theatre company Improbable, Lifegame toured widely, including a successful run at the National Theatre in London, where improvised lives were created for everybody from stage-door staff to leading actors, proving Keith’s belief that improvisation could create scenes not only of riotous comedy but also of great truth and pathos.
His book Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979), subsequently translated into more than a dozen languages, outlined his methods for spontaneous creation, encouraging the actor to accept the ideas of fellow performers, to ignore the imperative to be original or clever, and to use techniques of building on an initial idea to allow a fully shaped story to develop from improvisation. The playwright Mark Ravenhill credits Keith’s book with “turning me from somebody who thought about playwriting into a person who felt I had the permission and the techniques to write a play”. A subsequent book, Impro for Storytellers (1999), introduced readers to many of the techniques developed in his Theatresports work.
Born in the Devon fishing town of Brixham, Keith spent his early years living above the pharmacy run by his parents, Linda (nee Carter) and Richard Johnstone. At Totnes grammar school, he rejected rote learning and memorisation but wrote numerous stories and reports for the school magazine and won praise for his piano recitals of Beethoven and Debussy.
While training as a teacher at St Luke’s College in Exeter, Keith was inspired by the progressive injunction of an art teacher, Anthony Stirling, to “bring the art out of the child through experiential learning”. Taking up a teaching post at Wix primary school in Clapham Common, south London, Keith won a prize in an Observer short story competition in 1956, which brought him to the attention of the fledgling English Stage Company at the Royal Court theatre. Tony Richardson – director of the Court’s first great success, Look Back in Anger – offered Keith a commission.
For the next 10 years, Keith became an integral part of the Royal Court and an influential member of its first Writers’ Group, which included Ann Jellicoe, Edward Bond and Wole Soyinka. Realising that discussion and analysis were not advancing their work, the group took to their feet, with Keith leading sessions that developed storytelling skills through spontaneous improvisation and explored the status games inherent in any human interaction.
His play Brixham Regatta – with a walk-on part for a promising actor turned playwright, Harold Pinter – was presented as a Sunday night performance at the Royal Court in 1958. Some critics compared it favourably with Beckett, but one complained that it was a “manifestation of sadism”. In 1962 he directed the premiere of Jellicoe’s second play, The Knack, later adapted as a film. The character Tom, a painter who prizes instinct above education, expressed many of Keith’s views.
The increasing interest in improvised theatre that Keith developed was challenging at a time when all theatre scripts had to be approved in advance by a de facto censor, the Lord Chamberlain. When his show Clowning (1965) incorporated suggestions for scenes from the audience, the Lord Chamberlain requested that he should be given advance notice of what ideas the audience were likely to offer.
Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp (1959), co-directed by Keith and William Gaskill, had proved particularly incendiary. Combining improvised scenes from a predominantly black cast and verbatim material from House of Commons debates about the Mau Mau uprising, the performance turned into a wild, heated discussion between actors and audience.
Keith continued to lead international workshops until 2018 – sharing his methods not only with actors but also with educationists, scientists and business leaders, inspiring them with his ideas of collective creation.
His marriage to Ingrid Von Darl ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by their son, Benjamin, and grandson, Cort, and by a son, Dan, from another relationship.
