Keith Johnstone, Improv Trailblazer, Dies at 90

Keith Johnstone, a pioneer in improvisation who trained a generation of actors and comedians in impromptu performance and creativity, on and off the stage, has died. He was 90.

Johnstone died at Rockyview Hospital in Calgary on Saturday, according to his personal website, with no cause of death specified. The creator of Theatresports and co-founder of The Loose Moose Theatre Company was born in Devon, England, on Feb. 21, 1933.

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Johnstone trained at the Royal Court Theatre in London and was a teacher at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. According to Theresa Robbins Dudeck, co-director of the docu-series On Keith: Artists Speak on Johnstone and Impro, Johnstone developed his Impro System, or his improvisation theories, while at the Royal Court Theatre over 10 years to 1966. He eventually became associate director and head of the RCT Studio for professional actors.

“The RCT Studio, for Keith, was a ‘scientific laboratory,’ where he could investigate the nature of spontaneous creation,” Dudeck writes. “It is here he developed and refined most of the basic theories and methods of his Impro System and where he discovered the four actors that would become The Theatre Machine, Britain’s first pure improvisational troupe.”

The original Theatre Machine troupe, which officially launched in 1967, comprised Ben Benison, Roddy Maude-Roxby, Richard Morgan and Anthony Trent, with Johnstone serving as their director.

Summing up his philosophy, the key to improvisation is not to be prepared, Johnstone told a TEDx event in Calgary in 2016. “Improvisation is high risk. People think it’s like show business. It’s much more like sport,” he said, before adding the best performance calls for reaching for the obvious, not the clever. “The clever is an imitation of somebody else, really,” Johnstone added.

In January 2014, Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk told a group of Second City students in Chicago the origin of improvisation was not as many assumed in sketch comedy and troupes like The Groundlings and Saturday Night Live. Instead, he cited Johnstone at the RCT in the 1960s, when improv games were first used to help playwrights get their work onto the page for scripts.

“It wasn’t created for comics or even comedy writers. It started from ‘how can [playwrights] think deeply about their story and move that story along.’ That tells you a lot about what it was meant to be used for. Creating character. Story. Being in the moment,” Odenkirk told the students.

Johnstone moved to Canada in 1972 to become an acting professor at the University of Calgary, with a focus on encouraging performers to be more spontaneous and responsive. Significantly, the Canadian university gave Johnstone the seal of approval as a theorist and educator that had eluded him back in Britain, where he never ventured far from the confines of London’s theater world.

The International Theatresports Institute, which Johnstone launched in 1998, on its website explains how the British-Canadian pioneer of improvisation looked to reverse the impact of schooling on adults by getting them back in touch with childhood creativity and exploration.

“Keith wrote a list of rules of ‘Things teachers stopped me from doing,’ then he encouraged his students to do the opposite. His unorthodox technique was a success.  This experiment marks a starting point of Keith’s work in Spontaneous Improvisation,” the website states.

Through the Loose Moose Theatre Company, which Johnstone launched in 1977 along with Mel Tonkin and was its first artistic director, he trained future improv veterans like Bruce McCulloch and Mark McKinney of the Kids in the Hall troupe, FUBAR’s Paul Spence and Dave Lawrence and Norm Hiscock, a writer for Kids in the Hall, Parks and Recreation and King of the Hill, for which he earned an Emmy.

Hiscock in a March 2022 appearance on the Canadian Comedy Hall of Fame Podcast recalled the value of improv comedy to hone his sitcom scripts as he worked alongside Johnstone as part of Loose Moose troupe.

“For me, to try out material and to see it bomb in front of an audience is the best way to realize what works and doesn’t work,” Hiscock explained. “And it helped in being in a writing room and being loose and open to ideas and not being attached to ideas, too.”

Johnstone wrote books like Impro and Impro for Storytellers, and his ideas about improvisation and unprepared performance have influenced theater schools and business and management training specialists. He also was a frequent speaker at universities and film industry conferences and companies.

Johnstone’s website added, “Per Keith’s request, a festive ‘wake’ will be held in his honor.”

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