Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone, Introduction by Irving Wardle.

he struck me then as a revolutionary idealist looking around for a guillotine.

One of Johnstone’s plays is about an impotent old recluse, the master of a desolate castle, who has had the foresight to stock his deep-freeze with sperm. There is a power-cut and one of the sperm escapes into a goldfish bowl and then into the moat where it grows to giant size and proceeds to a whale of a life on the high seas.

Switch off the no-saying intellect and welcome the unconscious as a friend:

I was interested in their spontaneity.

so I learned to ‘hold the mind still’ like a hunter waiting in a forest.

–that’s how I deluded myself that my creativity was under my own control.

The dullness was not an inevitable consequence of age, but of education.

In the gentlest possible way, this teacher had been very violent.

People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity,

education can be a destructive process,

bad teachers are wrecking talent,

It was very upsetting to realise that if I was going to change for the better then I’d have to do it myself.

I was reading a book and I began to weep.

If I’d have wept over a poem in class the teacher would have been appalled.

I realised that my school had been teaching me not to respond.

The response of untutored people is infinitely superior.)

I forgot that inspiration isn’t intellectual, that you don’t have to be perfect.

I began to value people for their actions, rather than their thoughts.

I felt crippled, and ‘unfit’ for life, so I decided to become a teacher.

the student should never experience failure.

they disliked exactly those children I found most inventive.

gradually I realised that I wouldn’t work for people I didn’t like.

‘Alas! The time will come when a man’s worst enemies shall be those of his own house and family…’

I would first read plays as quickly as possible, and categorise them as pseudo-Pinter, fake-Osborne, phoney-Beckett, and so on.

Almost all were total failures.

It wasn’t a matter of lack of talent, but of miseducation. The authors of the pseudo-plays assumed that writing should be based on other writing, not on life.

Obviously, I felt I ought to study my craft, but the more I understood how things ought to be done, the more boring my productions were.

when I’m inspired, everything is fine, but when I try to get things right it’s a disaster.

I began to think of children not as immature adults, but of adults as atrophied children. But when I said this to educationalists, they became angry.

I remembered Stirling’s contempt for artists who form ‘self-admiration groups’ and wondered if we were deluding ourselves.

Was it right that every class should be like a party?