The show Spontaneous Potter has been a fan favourite on the Improv scene for many years – it has toured up and down the country and had many residences at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Well, it is now time to say goodbye after eight years, the Spontaneous Players are putting the show to bed and moving on to other adventures. Their last set of shows will begin this month, I caught up with Sam for one last interview about the show.
So, spontaneous players, an end of an era! You are saying farewell to Spontaneous Potter, how are you feeling about it?
Honestly it’s a little bittersweet! On the one hand, we have been doing the show for nearly a decade now and we are very ready to move onto new things. Harry Potter as a franchise has also become a bit of a poisoned well, and we are a trans-inclusive company, so even though we aren’t directly funding JK Rowling’s work, we felt it was definitely the right time to move on to new pastures.
At the same time, this show has been our baby for such a long time and we have had an absolute blast doing it. In many ways this feels like we’ve been looking after a sick animal and the time has finally come to release it back into the wild – we know it’s the right thing to do but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Even though Harry Potter is a huge fandom did you ever think your show would be as huge as it has been?
I don’t think we could have predicted the scale and longevity of the show in a million years, it’s far surpassed any expectations. When we first started performing together, we were doing a Sherlock Holmes themed improv show which was pretty successful for a couple of years – when we started Spontaneous Potter, I think we expected something similar. So to have been doing the show to huge audiences around the country for close to a decade is beyond a dream come true. We’d like to think people came for the Harry Potter content and stayed for the good improv!
What have been some of your favourite shows to be a part of?
That’s a tough question – like trying to choose a favourite child! We’ve done so many shows now that it’s really hard to keep track of them all, it sort of blends into one. Something really lovely about doing improv shows is people will tell us about shows they’ve seen which we have no memory of (or worse, thought they didn’t go well!), but for them they’ve been really impactful and memorable.
A few stand out moments that come to mind from over the years:
– We had a show which ended with Albus Dumbledore renaming himself “Albus Drum-bledore” and leading the entire audience in drumming on their chairs
– One show featured someone trying to use the “accio” spell to summon a lion from the nearest zoo in the first scene, but nothing happened because it was too far away. Cut to the end of the show an hour later, with a “lion” flying in from side stage to take out Voldemort
– We got a show title once which included “Part 2”, so we did the entire show in a horrific apocalyptic version of Hogwarts where something terrible had clearly happened in the non-existent “Part 1” of the show which was alluded to but never fully explained
What has been the most niche character of the harry potter world that you have had to play?
Part of the conceit of our show is that one cast member (Stu Murphy) has never read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, so we love to throw in very obscure characters just to mess with him. For every Harry, Ron and Hermione we have in the shows, we probably also have a Dennis Creevey or a Mundungus Fletcher.
Some of the fun deep cut characters to throw in for the real nerds in the crowd are the named but rarely/never shown Hogwarts professors like Charity Burbage (Muggle Studies) or Septima Vector (Arithmancy). I also have a soft spot for playing the paintings of the former headmasters in Dumbledore’s office – Armando Dippet, Phineas Nigellus Black, Dillys Derwent, Dexter Fortescue… there really is no end of characters to pull from.
What has been your favourite to play?
I think each of us has different fun characters to default to.
– I love to play Dobby, usually in situations Dobby has no right to be
– Will Naameh plays a wicked Voldemort, usually with an uncomfortable amount of snakey tongue action
– Mara Joy does a great sexually-repressed girlboss Bellatrix Lestrange and an aggressively Scottish McGonagall
– Stu Murphy, as discussed, knows nothing about the Potter universe beyond what he has learnt from the show, so usually ends up playing someone like Obi-wan Kenobi or Rambo
– Jenny Laahs plays the piano
– Emily Rose is just happy to be included
what are you going to miss most about performing this show?
The audiences! People would turn out for the show in a way I haven’t seen for improv. We had full costumes and props, and fans would stick around shows to get photos and chat. I truly hope some of them stick around for whatever comes next.
what has been your favourite venues to play?
We’ve been very lucky to have performed at some great venues over the years. We were able to perform in beautiful historic rooms like the Rose Street Theatre and the Teviot Debating Hall for Edinburgh Fringe, both of which really felt straight out of a fantasy novel. The Leicester Square Theatre in London is such an iconic comedy venue, and seeing the sharpie signatures on the walls backstage from so many icons of UK comedy is really amazing. And the Stand and Glee comedy clubs across the UK have been staunch supporters of the show for a long time and had us back time and again, so we would be remiss not to mention them.
Have you ever had any of the actors from the films be in the audience?
Not as far as we know! We’ve had a few celebs in though – we found out from venue staff after the fact that one of the Game of Thrones cast came to see us, and Prince Edward brought his family to our kids’ show one year at Fringe. We had to let his security guys in while we were doing our soundcheck to scope out the exits – they were in “plain clothes” but were the least inconspicuous men I’ve ever seen, so it wasn’t subtle.
A character you will miss playing?
I’m sad that I won’t be able to have one last Dobby saxophone solo (there have been shockingly many)
What is next for spontaneous players?
We’ve got a trial show at Edinburgh International Improv Festival which will be the first outing of “Spontaneous Rings: The Unofficial Improvised Middle-Earth Parody”. We have a few other ideas up our sleeves, too – any of which could become our next big show – but we have plenty of time to figure out what we want to focus on going forward. Watch this space!
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