Q&A With Jonathon Oldfield

Exquisite Corpse takes a childhood drawing game and turns it into a live comedy experiment. What first made you realise that concept could work onstage? A lot of my comedy inspiration comes from things that aren't comedy at all. I’m also always on the lookout for containers that might hold different ideas well - buckets to fill with ha-has, if you will. The exquisite corpse game ticked both these boxes. I was immediately excited to fill that bucket with sand (sand = jokes) and that was a good indication it might work. The game lends itself naturally to character comedy: multiple men built from contradictory parts that don’t quite make sense, and yet are somehow still recognisable. Does it actually work on stage? You’ll have to come and see the show to find out.

The show changes every night depending on the audience. Does that unpredictability feel exciting or slightly terrifying? I started out performing comedy with The Improverts, Edinburgh University's student improv group, so I always knew the show needed an element of unpredictability in it. It's exciting and terrifying in equal measure - excitifying, terrifiting. You can feel the moment an audience clocks that what they're watching will only ever happen once, right there, and that they're as responsible for it as I am.

Your comedy feels incredibly inventive and fast-moving, but there's also a lot of structure underneath. How do you balance spontaneity with control? Control is about being ready with a joke or a funny idea you want to share with the audience. Spontaneity is about being willing to be laughed at - including, maybe especially, when something goes wrong. Somewhere in between these two things is what makes live comedy such a thrilling experience to watch. Between the planned and the unplanned. All of that is to say, I don’t know how I balance it, I frequently get it wrong, but I am optimistic and willing to get up on stage to try again.

Control and spontaneity also feel especially relevant with this show as the child’s game itself relies on both those elements. In the original game, one artist is only in control of one of the elements of a body, and must resign themselves to the spontaneity of whatever is revealed at the end of the game. This creates a fun playground from which to build a comedy hour.

The show is packed with bizarre characters, from a man visiting every Zizzi's in the UK to compulsive liars and dancing allotment owners. Where do these people come from? It's hard to know where any of these characters really come from, but a lot of them have ended up with a sense of universal forgotten nostalgia in them. I'm a Third Culture Kid - born in the UK, then raised across Mexico, Thailand, South Korea and France before moving back here as a teenager. So I often ordinary British things looked funny to me in a way they don't to people who've always lived here and are just used to it. Things everyone else stopped finding strange a long time ago, continue to baffle me. All my characters come originally from something that makes me laugh. Then I start playing around with it like a piece of blue-tac until it’s in a shape that feels right.

You perform every character yourself, using your body as the canvas. Does physical transformation feel central to your comedy? Absolutely. It's not too difficult just put on a different voice or accent for a laugh (ask any uncle at a wedding). It's harder to actually change yourself into a different person, and that’s where the body comes in. In pretending to be other people, I often end up exploring myself. In this case, what my body can do, where it's let me down over the years. I've broken my right arm seven times, had meningitis twice, plus glandular fever and shingles for good measure. The show is partly me figuring out what all of that's done to me, and partly just an excuse to move my body in silly new ways.

Jonathan Oldfield: Exquisite Corpse will be performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival from the 5th – 30th August (not the 17th). For more information visit: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/jonathan-oldfield-exquisite-corpse