The cricket forward-defensive and improvising story

Australian cricket legend Steve Waugh plays a textbook forward defensive to kick off his improv show just right.

In test-match cricket — stay with me here — one of the most revered shots a batter can play is the forward-defensive.

It’s a conservative shot in some ways, not scoring any runs, but it’s absolutely essential if the batter wants to stick around long-enough to do the flashy highlights-reel stuff later in the day.

The forward-defensive a shot for the purist: Very technical and pretty unremarkable to the casual viewer, but requires the full suite of skill to pull off. In a split second, the batter needs to recognise that the ball being bowled is simply too good, and what their team requires is that they don’t lose their wicket by hitting out. The batter simply takes a big stride forward and blocks the ball with their bat. Surviving to face the next ball.

What’s this got to do with improvising a narrative show? A good test-match batter generally has a forward-defensive in their armoury. In a narrative improv show, a good long-form improviser can do the same. They look after the whole show and their teammates by doing the necessary, unflashy, stuff first. They recognise that they need to establish ideas and characters that will stick around long-enough to be funny later, because they’re well-rounded, grounded and interesting now.

An audience might not even notice the improviser who is doing all the timely editing, establishing the grounded reality necessary for comedy to happen, putting the chairs back where they belong, making non-comedic emotional choices that make us care about what we’re watching. But in a functioning narrative improv team, they’ll be everyone’s favourite castmate to perform with.

Likewise, cricket crowds may not relish watching a batter who defends well and makes considered choices teammates can build-on later, but their teammates will love to bat alongside them. They might also quietly assemble a 50 or 100 almost without anyone noticing. For the non-cricket fans that have made it this far: that’s good, and also the superpower of possibly England’s greatest ever test-batter, Joe Root. An improviser willing to do that grunt work in a narrative show will often find their character quietly becoming more important scene-by-scene.

Image credit: Samarth Shirke on Unsplash. This batter has got a bit clever and missed his defensive shot, opening himself up to an LBW appeal. Not sure what that means for improv, but it isn’t good.

A test-match cricket team full of swashbuckling aggressive batters will generally lose more games than they win (the England test team of 2022/23 excepted). A narrative improv team full of huge showboating gag-hounds will struggle in more shows than they succeed. Just as this cricket team won’t stick around long enough to score big runs, so this improv team will struggle to maintain the audience’s suspension of disbelief long-enough to pull together a satisfying show with a story we can care about.

An audience will start laughing at the early scenes, but without caring about these characters they’ll tire of seeing joke-after-joke one-upmanship from the cast, looking for an out-line in every scene, without some characters to understand and root for. It’s a pretty hollow feeling when what we’re aiming to do is improvise a compelling story first.

Taking this analogy way further than it deserves, all of this becomes more important at ‘away gigs’. A test team touring to England is often found out by a late-swinging ball. If their defensive game isn’t rock solid, they’ll struggle to get a foothold in the game.

Similarly, these fundamentals in a narrative (any) improv show in front of a new audience become even more essential. An audience not familiar with improv, this particular team, or in a venue that is conducive to swing-bowling given its mix of humidity and a hostile atmosphere, needs more time to buy into to the basic vocabulary of what you’re doing and how it works. Investing in the grounded, truthful, reality of your scenes early assures an audience that they’re in safe hands.

It might be unglamorous and pretty thankless, but time spent working on your improv forward-defensive is time well-spent.

By happy coincidence, the narrative improv comedy show I’m directing: Winner — the improvised sports biopic — will debut at The Free Association, London every Friday and Saturday from 24 March to 29 April. Details: Thefreeassociation.co.uk