Handing over the Blog to Martin here - he’s a student of mine and a performer with the Harold Club - he did the classes to help with his writing, and has stuck around and performed, though he always claims that _this_ will be his last performance.

I asked him to give some feedback on the the show and he sent this through to me - I thought I share it (with his kind permission). So here it is.

My Experience of the Harold at Brisbane Central Library 8/10/11

I seem to recall someone, maybe Charna or Del, saying that improv performance was something like jumping off a cliff and taking a whole bunch of other people with you.  Saturday’s performance was exactly like that for me and I really don’t like heights.

The Climb: I think everyone agreed that the practice wasn’t great but it didn’t succeed because of good reasons not bad ones.  Because everyone was enthusiastic to get onto stage, scenes became crowded out with too many players.  It was good to know that everyone had each other’s back but unfortunately there were too many fronts to those backs on the stage at the same time.  Brad’s feedback on the practice session pointed this out and probably set us right for the performance.  The thing that I did in the practice that I liked most was in the scene painting where I said that there were two eyes peering out from the blanket box.

The Edge and Fall: it was when Brad told us what we were doing in the performance that my mind decided to blank out.  Even the 100m free abseil in Waitomo didn’t make me do that.  It’s not as if I haven’t got nervous before performances previously but I’d never before been attacked so badly by the mind zombies.  It was total zombification.  It was the kind of zombification that Zen Buddhists aspire to when they become zombies.  Absolute blankness.  I went outside but I couldn’t speak to my friends and my wife who’d arrived.  I muttered some pleasantries and then did circuits between the books and the elevator trying to focus.  I went to the toilet and splashed some water on my face.  That didn’t do much good either.

The Performance: I was standing off stage thinking, this is it, this is the last time I do this, I get through this and I call it quits.  It was lucky that my first entrance on stage during More/Less was a non-verbal part and I got a few laughs for it.  I am still puzzled by Brad’s direction in More/Less to be a maniac without obviously showing that I am one and I think I showed my perplexity but I finished it with a good final line (“wish you’d gone for the vegetarian option on Tuesday eh?”).  The monologues always do good things for me for generating ideas for the Harold and it was no different this time.  It gave me some confidence then for getting on stage with my idea for the scene.  Over the three acts I thought it went really well too even though I thought I was playing the wife to Greg’s husband but nobody else did.  Again a good last line “alright you can mate with me”.  In fact, I think without a doubt it was my best public performance and I was buzzing for days afterwards.

The Montage: I loved the different scenes in the Montage.  The jump rope rap off.  The chicken nugget caravan scene.  The Escape from the Island of Dr. Moreau.  The cuckolded husband scene.  It was all hilarious.

The Dinner: I had dinner with my friends who’d come along to see the Harold and I was asked how much we’d rehearsed that Harold.  Having done so much improve now I find it odd that people think this.

The Moral of the Story?  Maybe I have to go completely over the edge to get a good performance.