The Comedy Store Players joined me in 2013 in setting up the Improvisation Academy. Since 1985, the Players have been performing as a team, their longevity recognised by the Guinness Book of Records. You can see them every Wednesday and Sunday in London, mostly featuring the current core team of Josie Lawrence, Paul Merton, Neil Mullarkey, Lee Simpson, Andy Smart and Richard Vranch.

In many improvisation groups around the world, performers offer classes to the audiences. When an audience sees a great show, they might wonder how it’s done and how they can get involved. A community of performing and teaching develops, often with extra outreach to local organisations. That hadn’t happened with the Comedy Store Players in London. Until now.

With Neil Mullarkey and Lee Simpson as co-directors, we have established a curriculum that covers the application of improvisation to a series of topics in life and at work. While the three of us are passionate about theatre and comedy, the activities of the Academy do not teach theatre (or comedy) or require any theatrical (or comedic) skills from participants. We’re interested in what the ideas and principles of improvisation can offer to individuals, teams and communities. These ideas can be found in many fields, of which theatre just happens to be currently prominent.

This means that we can enter any territory in which people need to be creative or innovative; where they need to perform better in the widest senses of performance; where people interact in groups and need to navigate complexity to solve problems or make things better.

And why me? Well, I’ve worked with most of the Comedy Store Players over many years, not as a performer, but as a producer, primarily as a BBC producer of radio comedies. And I’ve been teaching improvisation, first to actors, then to members of the public, and then within organisations. In 2001 I co-founded the Applied Improvisation Network of which I’m currently President. Here’s a TEDx talk in which I describe how all that happened.

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