Obituary: Keith Johnstone – playwright, director and pioneer of improvisational theatre

Keith Johnstone was one of the great innovators of modern British theatre, his pioneering championing of improvisation influencing generations of actors and directors in reshaping the creative environment of the rehearsal room. Focused on creating wholly original performances true to the moment and free from what he saw as the artificiality of scripted material, Johnstone integrated lessons learned from his training as a teacher with a liberating use of improvisation to develop new ways of finding narrative, character and meaning.

He later formulated his theories into two books arguing for the value of improvisation that continue to guide actors, directors and teachers alike. Among his more memorable instructive sayings was the maxim: “Go on to a stage to make relationships. At least you won’t be alone.”

Born to chemist parents in Brixham, Devon, he showed himself a budding writer and promising pianist at Totnes Grammar School. After studies at St Luke’s College, Exeter he taught at a primary school in Clapham, London. During his time there, success in an Observer newspaper short-story competition in 1956 earned him a commission from Tony Richardson at London’s Royal Court Theatre.

Directed by William Gaskill and Ann Jellicoe, the ensuing double bill – Brixham Regatta, a reminiscence of his early childhood, and For Children – in 1958 featured a non-speaking appearance by a young Harold Pinter. It met with mixed reviews, The Stage finding it “mystifying” while another reviewer favourably compared it to Samuel Beckett.

The Beckett reference would have tickled Johnstone. During his time in Sloane Square, he had struck up a relationship with the playwright, who made a unique exception for him to his strict ‘no observers’ rule during his rehearsals there.

Focusing on British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and with a predominantly black cast, the following year’s largely improvised Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp provoked the Spectator to describe it as “the Royal Court in its most militant, inept, radical, ambitious and pretentious mood”.

Johnstone went on to direct Jellicoe’s second play, The Knack, at the Court in 1962, to co-found its first Writers’ Group – whose membership included Jellicoe, Edward Bond and Wole Soyinka – and played a leading part in its experimental Theatre Studio laboratory.

His increasing interest in improvisation as a tool for making theatre inevitably led his to his leaving the script-centred Court to pursue his conviction. With the actors Ben Benison, Roddy Maude-Roxby, Richard Morgan and Anthony Trent, he formed Theatre Machine in 1967. Its model of freshly minted off-the-cuff scenes steered by a guiding host (invariably Johnstone himself) would later be mimicked on television by Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

Theatre Machine went on to tour throughout Europe, developing the physical skills of clowning alongside linguisticingenuity to find new ways of communicating. Under Johnstone’s stewardship, the company became a finely tuned instrument. The Stage suggested its staging of Moby Dick at the Mercury Theatre in 1970 “bore every hallmark of careful rehearsal”, a criticism with which Johnstone took stern umbrage in the following week’s letters page.

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Evidence of the abiding vitality of Johnstone’s approach to making theatre came in 2004’s The Life Game – “part chat show, part impro show” – which was devised with Improbable’s Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott and Lee Simpson. Touring in the UK and to America and Australia, it also enjoyed a run at the National Theatre.

Johnstone continued to lead workshops until 2018. One such, in 2009, was attended by Mark Ravenhill who, in a report on the event in the Guardian, explained his presence by declaring it was “because Johnstone made me into a playwright”.

Ravenhill’s Damascene moment had come while reading Johnstone’s first book, Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (1979), familiarly referred to as “the improviser’s bible”. Its influence was felt much further afield, indelibly establishing itself in theatres and teaching institutions around the world.

Johnstone’s Impro for Storytellers (1999) elaborated on lessons learned from Theatresports and was an early statement from the International Theatresports Institute that Johnstone had founded the previous year. Outside of the theatre, he brought valuable insights to workshops with universities, businesses, management training specialists and humanities research institutes.

In a telling aside in Ravenhill’s Guardian article, the playwright described Johnstone as “wary of the guru status that many in improvisation have given him”, recording his pert and characteristically self-denying response as: “It stops them inventing for themselves.”

Donald Keith Johnstone was born on February 21, 1933, and died on March 11, aged 90. He is survived by his sons, Benjamin (from his marriage to Ingrid Von Darl, whom he divorced in 1981) and Dan, from another relationship.