Lifegame

I love this show. I saw it in 2006 at the National and loved it every bit as much yesterday. It’s an impro show where they bring on a guest - sometimes arranged by the theatre, sometimes from the audience - interview them about their life and act out key moments from that life in a variety of ways.

What’s staggering about the show is the ethical weight of it. Oh and it’s very funny but the ethical weight of it seems to me something about the respect and generosity and attention paid to a life; finding the turning points, the laughter, the absurdity all seems to be a remarkably holistic way of understanding the weight of being a person and the responsibility of living a life. The team of improvisers are very funny, but also full of insight; they never mock - they find the humour and keep respectful without being pious.

This does seem to me to have an ethical value. Philosophically, debates in ethics tend to begin with a debate between deontologists (like Kant, who believe that the ethical value of an action lies in the principles behind the action) and consequentialists (like Bentham or Mill, who believe that you judge its value from its consequences).

The new kid on the block is actually the old kid on the block - virtue ethics - which thinks both these views are partial because they deal too precisely with particular actions. They say, look, who thinks like that? Who feels a satisfying, responsible ethical life is to follow a narrow set of principles or to calculate outcomes. Isn’t the life well lived one that embraces the whole person? And if that’s right, we should pay attention not to a narrow sense of a person’s ‘moral actions’ but the full range of their activities and feelings, their personality and projects.

Now, as it happens, I think some of this is rather vacuous when it comes down to it and rather conservative. (We don’t have to work out what a good person is, we all know who they are, say the Virtue Ethicists: Nelson Mandela, perhaps some sporting hero, a brave and principled leader, someone witty and graceful and thoughtful like Stephen Fry... but all this does is deliver us the status quo and tell us that we will find ‘the good life’ in it. In comparison, Mill and Kant are revolutionaries.) However, it does ask good questions about the other two theories and has encouraged people, for example, to look at the later Metaphysics of Morals in Kant’s work - and not just the earlier Groundwork or Critique of Practical Reason, which might be seen as somewhat more drily ‘legislative’ in their articulation of moral duties. It suggests, I think rightly, that ethics is a field that should embrace not just lies, murder and betrayal, but laughter, friendship, fine wine and great art.

Lifegame fits into this picture by providing a rounded sense of the whole person. The theatre shows us much more than simply the principles on which people act and the statements they make; we see the way they look at each other, the way they hold their bodies, the grace and confidence of their movements, the comfort they feel in their own skin, the profound ambivalence we can have for each other and the inexpressible bonds that connect us all. It’s impossible to miss the feeling of seriousness and weight underneath the comedy.

Last night’s guest was Kerry Shale, the actor. He recalled that he was never encouraged to be an actor and that he great-uncle George (IIRC) had been a bit-part actor in Hollywood and a figure of some criticism in his family. In his early twenties, Kerry had somewhat dropped out and was working as a parking lot attendant when he made the decision to defy his parents and try to become an actor. Phelim McDermott asked to see this scene, but he asked to see it as the ghost of Uncle George visiting the young stoner Kerry in his booth. The twist was that he asked Kerry Shale to play George.

It was an exquisitely funny scene. Kerry played his uncle, quite inaccurately he said, with a New York Jewish accent and an improvised mask, prepared by Julian Crouch. Lee Simpson played the young Kerry, who asked ‘Are you really there or is this because of [gestured at the spliff]?’ ‘Does it really matter?’ asked George spreading his arms. But at one moment, ‘George’ asked ‘Kerry’ who he really was, and after some hesitation, Kerry replied, ‘an actor’. ‘Don’t apologise,’ said his Uncle. ‘An actor,’ he repeated, more firmly now. ‘Louder,’ said George. ‘I’m an actor,’ he answered. The audience was both laughing and hushed somehow. We were watching a man revisiting a key moment in his life, both wanting to affirm the path he’d taken but also impatient with his young fecklessness and somehow feeling, I thought, that even now, he might take a different turn.

Dramaturgically, the team are wonderful at creating a satisfying shape to the evening. It’s an obvious shape, to be fair - laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, moving - and it’s the advice I give people to do wedding speeches - but their ability to weave it together with textures of callback and creativity, through the variety of dramatic means and structures through which the scenes are developed make this a very rich and powerful evening.

And funny. Don’t forget, it’s very, very funny.