Seniority v Talent

Last night I caught up with David Shore, an amazingly talented Canadian improviser who's relocated to London.  He is an alumnus of the mainstage shows at The Second City, Toronto and Improv Olympic (IO) West in LA and his move here is great news for the UK scene.

Both Second City and IO have well established highly formalised improv training schemes that produce some of North America's best comedic talents and generate massive sums of money along the way.  London has nothing like it.  People get into improv in the UK either through the traditional drama schools such as RADA and Guildhall, through university troupes like the Oxford Imps or via a myriad of classes being run in school halls and dance studios all over London every weekend.  Potentially there's a gap in the market for a London equivalent to these great American institutions.

Certainly there's money to be made and therein lies the rub: that money will be made not in ticket sales but rather through the classes: -

More students = more money

Only a small percentage of those who sign up for improv classes should ever be put on a stage in front of a paying audience.  Certainly there are many corollary benefits to such classes in terms of creativity, life skills and so on but there is a clear need to manage the expectations of each student.  There are plenty of people who will pay good money to lock into a system where seniority supposedly trumps talent.  The North American schools are generally pretty good at selling the classes without an implicit promise of 'stage time' because unless they maintain the quality of their mainstage shows then sooner or later it all falls apart.

Bad mainstage shows = fewer famous alumni = less students = less money

Sydney Theatresports, where I was trained, went into precisely this sort of downward spiral about ten years ago and it's never quite recovered.  Some of our senior people began to see the classes as an income stream rather than a way to reinvigorate our performing company with fresh talent.

An interesting metric might be this: -

The total amount a student pays from first class to first performance

In 1990 I took my first class.  It cost me $3 (three dollars).  After five classes I was onstage at the legendary Belvoir Street Theatre.  My intake included lots of writers, comics, cabaret performers as well as the usual teachers, plumbers and lawyers.

Ten years later my equivalent was paying as much as $1500 before playing to a paying audience.  That 9900% increase drove out everyone but the lawyers and teachers.  Not only were the classes drawing from a smaller pool of potential students but the sheer enormity of the fees led to increased pressure on the system to cast every graduating student in a mainstage show regardless of actual talent.  We ended up with overpopulated casts full of people who only loved the idea of performing.  Even at a distance it was obvious that they weren't having any fun on stage.  No one pays to watch that and our audiences fell further.

So does David start by staging the best possible shows with performers already on London scene in order to attract more talented students or does he start from scratch, relying on his considerable reputation to fill classes and then launch his style of improv with performers made in his own image?