Book Reviews: Improvisation – A Practical Guide

It's always useful as a drama teacher to have a range of ‘go to’ improvisation guides on your shelf when you start introducing students to devising, and when encouraging them to build their confidence developing scenes and characters on stage without reliance on script.

Improvisation – A Practical Guide by Jason Moran goes into great detail about the history of improvisation. It includes 10 detailed chapters on improvisation in more depth, should you need this, and houses an index of games at the end. If you are an actor or director who is working on a play and you have the time and space to collaborate with your ensemble to work around the script, or to devise your own piece, having sufficient rehearsal time to explore these ideas with the help of improvisation is great. This book will help you to use improvisation to deepen your connection with the audience and think about improvisation beyond the stage.

Unfortunately, for me, this guide is far too longwinded. As a teacher looking for some fun, snappy in-class exercises to get my students up onto the stage with improvisation starters, this book is far too loquacious to be useful. It would be lovely to have the time to explore all of the approaches suggested in the book in detail, but there honestly just isn't the time in a school setting to do this and this book doesn't enable you to dip in and pluck out the useful sections in a time sensitive way. The only bit I found really useful in practice was the index of games. This 20-page section is what I was hoping the entire book would be like. I found myself leafing through the pages, asking myself, where are the actual improvisation exercises? The games index gives a range of different ideas to try out in a concise and useful way. The other 130 plus pages are just too lengthy to digest in a teachable way.

There are lots of photographs in the book which I feel are unnecessary as the text provides clear instructions. Two actors looking up towards an unidentified object is something I don't feel I need in picture format. If you are directing and want to do more in-depth, specific reading on improvisation to develop you and your actors’ techniques in this area, then I'm sure this book's approach will prove useful, but for me it was slightly repetitive.