Six years of building this thing from scratch. Today it officially became big enough to need a backup plan, and I am still processing how that actually feels.
Our improv troupe hired its first ever paid understudy today, a genuinely significant milestone after six years of building this specific company essentially from scratch, starting with four of us performing in a rented room above a pub to whatever small crowd we could scrape together, growing gradually into something now large enough and successful enough that we can actually afford to pay someone specifically to learn our existing performers’ roles as a genuine backup plan rather than simply hoping nobody ever gets too sick or too unavailable to perform.
I want to be honest that watching another performer, genuinely talented in her own right, sit in on rehearsal today specifically to start learning my own typical roles and rhythms within our established scenes produced a considerably stranger emotional reaction in me than I fully anticipated going into today’s session, a specific, slightly uncomfortable mix of genuine professional pride at how far this company has grown, and a considerably less flattering, more possessive instinct I was not entirely proud to notice surfacing as I watched someone else start absorbing patterns and instincts I have spent six years developing as, in some sense, specifically my own contribution to this particular ensemble.
I think that possessive instinct, uncomfortable as it was to notice in myself today, is worth naming honestly rather than simply pretending it did not arise at all. Six years of building something this specific and this personal, developing a particular improvisational voice within this exact ensemble, creates a kind of ownership that does not disappear simply because the rational, professional part of my brain fully understands and genuinely supports why the company needs a proper understudy system now that we are booking larger, more consequential shows where a single performer’s unavailability could genuinely jeopardise an entire booking.
Our troupe leader, noticing my slightly subdued mood partway through today’s session, pulled me aside briefly to check in, and I ended up being considerably more honest with her about the specific discomfort than I initially planned to be, admitting the possessive instinct rather than pretending I felt nothing but straightforward professional pride about the milestone. She was genuinely understanding, mentioning she had experienced something remarkably similar herself when the company first grew large enough to need a second full ensemble several years back, before I had even joined, a reassurance that helped considerably more than I expected given how specifically personal today’s discomfort had felt in the moment.
Watching our new understudy actually work through one of my typical scene patterns later in the session, I noticed myself gradually shifting from that initial possessive discomfort toward something closer to genuine, professional curiosity, watching how she brought her own distinct instincts and timing to material I had, over six years, come to think of as reflecting a very particular, personal comedic voice. She did not simply replicate what I do. She brought her own genuinely interesting approach to the same underlying scene structures, a reminder that the actual creative material we have built together as a company exists, in some real sense, independently of any single performer’s specific execution of it.
I think that reframing, watching someone else’s genuinely different take on material I had started to think of as uniquely mine, was actually the single most useful thing to come out of today’s otherwise emotionally complicated session, a genuine, direct demonstration that this company’s actual creative value lives in the underlying material and the ensemble’s collective chemistry rather than in any individual performer being strictly irreplaceable, a distinction that matters enormously for the company’s continued growth even if it required a small, honest confrontation with my own less flattering instincts to actually arrive at properly.
Six years ago, four of us performing above a pub to whoever wandered in could not have imagined a version of this company successful enough to need a paid understudy system. I am genuinely, properly proud of how far we have come, even on a day that required working through some genuinely uncomfortable feelings to actually arrive at that pride cleanly.
I stayed late after the rest of the ensemble had left tonight, sitting alone in the now-empty rehearsal space for a while, thinking through the whole arc of these six years properly, from that first tiny room above the pub through tonight’s genuinely significant milestone. I do not think I have actually given myself proper credit, across the day-to-day grind of building this company gradually, week by week, for just how far we have actually come, and tonight, oddly, sitting alone in an empty room processing a complicated mix of pride and possessiveness, felt like the first time in a while I properly let myself feel the full weight of that accomplishment.
I texted the original three co-founders before finally heading home, a short message simply thanking them for building this thing with me across all these years, and got back a flurry of genuinely warm responses within minutes, each of them, it turned out, similarly moved by hearing today’s specific milestone described properly rather than just mentioned in passing during our usual group chat logistics. Six years, four founders, one paid understudy, and, tonight, a genuine, shared moment of properly acknowledging how much we have actually built together.
More from this author at Bethan Morgan, prat.uk.