The Harold, when you first approach it, can seem intimidating. Sure, it’s only an opening, nine scenes, and two group games, but how it all links together is a lot. A lot to remember and a lot to get right*. But here’s the thing: it’s all there for a reason. A Harold is not a problem set by a capricious maths teacher, but a collection of rules that can inspire the players and make a satisfying show for the audience. They are not the only rules, but they are good ones.
Jason Schotts describes the Harold as a train going past at speed. When you first learn it, the train is so close to your face that it’s just noise, colour, and motion. You can’t pick anything out. But the more Harolds you do, the further away the train is, and the easier to see.
Below, I have answered some of the most common questions that students ask when they start to study Harold. Most of them are variations on one (very reasonable) theme: ‘Why is the Harold like this?’. I hope that in understanding the why, playing Harold will be a little easier, the structure less arbitrary. I hope the train will be a little further away.
(NB: The below assumes a passing knowledge of the structure of a Harold and basic Harold vocabulary. Don’t start here.)
What is a Harold opening for?
Most improv will take a suggestion from the audience, say ‘Marble’. If you are just doing a single scene or game, you might start playing marbles. That works. But a Harold needs more than a single idea. The opening creates them. So here are some things ‘Marble’ makes me think of:
- The skill needed to sculpt marble
- Playing and collecting mrbels
- Fat marbled in a piece of meat
These ideas (and those from the rest of my team) mean that we now have options for scenes. We can choose something rather than starting from scratch. Options in improv are a magical thing.
Why make the first three beats different from each other?
Let’s say that each of the above ideas becomes one of the first beat scenes. We have a sculptor wishing he could sculpt cloth, two kids comparing Pokémon collections, and diners making outlandish demands in a high-end restaurant. All of the scenes are distinct. They will not mush together in your brain, or the audience’s. They are easy to return to, and make the show feel like there is an abundance of material left to explore. Distinct ideas give a sense of space and possibility.
What do group games do?
After each beat, a traditional Harold has a group game with the whole company onstage. Whether they are familiar set structures or discovered in the moment, these are a palate-cleansing change of rhythm for both audience and players.
But they also have another important function. Group games are opportunities to see connections between the scenes, to make the show a show, rather than just a collection of separate bits. Going back to our example above, we notice the idea of luxury and greed, and play a group game where a sequence of French aristocrats are brought to the guillotine, confess their crimes, and are beheaded. As a group, we have made explicit some of the themes of the show.
Why keep the second beat scenes separate?
Improv is a delicate dance of repetition and change. Too much repetition and it becomes boring, too much change and there is never solid ground to stand on. In the second beat, we come back to ideas from the first set of scenes and explore them.
But (like the Ghostbusters) we don’t cross the streams yet. The same sculptor is now working entirely with sound, his works less and less easy to understand. We don’t see the Pokémon kids again, but two gap-year kids are one-upping each other’s exploits. And to round it off, two home cooks are finishing a meal that took a whole day to cook. Keeping the three streams distinct gives the dopamine-popping delight of recognising something from earlier, while allowing us to see it from a different angle. The same ideas are held up to the light and turned like a gem.
How is the third beat different?
Although the most traditional structure will have three scenes in the third beat as well, you are likely to see ideas and characters crossing between the streams. One of the Pokémon kids is rich enough to buy a sculpture which has no physical form, the home cooks have opened a beans-on-toast restaurant where the gap year kids now eat, satisfied with the familiar tastes of home.
Ideas and streams crash together, stories resolve, and justice is done. We find the sense of an ending. The third beat breaks the rules and realities that have been established so far, rules and realities that mean something because we have seen them twice.
At the most abstract level (useful to some, useless to others), a Harold is a process of creating a lot of ideas, building them, and then combining and repurposing them. It’s a divergent and then convergent structure, like opening a box, unpacking everything inside, and then packing it back away again. The opening, beats, and games all have roles in helping this to happen with a satisfying rhythm and speed.
*I am very aware of the danger of using the word ‘right’ in improv. I use it here to refer to playing a classic ‘training wheels’ Harold structure. Of course, once this feels comfortable, there are many other ways you can skin the cat. I think it’s wise to do things well before you start changing the rules. ‘Right’ here means everything is in the correct place, not necessarily that it is good improv. That’s a different consideration.