Circuit Training 76: Joseph Morpurgo's High Concepts

Following all that sinister talk of arms sales and spying last time out with Mark Thomas, Circuit Training now takes an unlikely detour into the methods of musical mavericks like John Oswald and Madlib, via the brilliantly inventive Joseph Morpurgo.

This moonlighting music journo came to the comedy fraternity's attention at the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe, where his high-concept character show Truthmouth earned him excellent reviews. For a taster, the most memorable bit can be seen on YouTube, a Shakespearian monologue by an infamous old Nokia character ("Pity this forgotten serpent!")

Morpurgo's stage performances over the following year were mainly with Austentatious, the hugely successful Jane Austen-based improv troupe he co-founded (whose debut DVD is now out on Go Faster Stripe), as well as a smidgeon of TV work. But he re-emerged as a solo performer at the 2014 Fringe with a bold new project, Odessa, which brought a suggestion of experimental sampling culture to the comedy stage. Again the reviews were often euphoric, and on Monday night he begins a run of that show at London's Invisible Dot, who have signed him up longer-term. A good fit, it seems...

Did your life change dramatically after the 2013 Fringe? Or did you just head back to the day job?

Yeah, I was still working full time for about half of the year after that first Edinburgh. Then I went part time, so that was a change. It [comedy] ceased to be something I was squeezing into evenings and weekends and became something I could spend a bit more time on. The transformative things for me that year were in October, I did two nights of the show at the Invisible Dot, and they then took me on their books. That was a big moment.

Signing with Invisible Dot must be like signing to a cool record label - Warp maybe?

It's funny, that's almost exactly the same analogy I used to my office friends about who they were - I think I said Hyperdub rather than Warp but it's the exact same principle.

They even do the Factory Records thing, numbering absolutely everything.

Yeah, there's a very deliberate sense of an industrial aesthetic. The gut reaction was to think 'wow, all these people I love - Tim Key, Jonny Sweet, Jamie Demetriou, Claudia O'Doherty' - but more than that, like with a label, you feel like you're part of a curated roster. There's a sense of belonging to an interesting project, which is a different state of affairs to signing to most producers, who'll be right by you or they won't be right by you, you'll be doing your show in isolation. Whereas with this you feel like you're part of a package.

You were in Harry & Paul's Story Of The 2's this year too [Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse's wickedly funny history of BBC Two] - how did that come about?

Harry saw me doing a 15-minute slot of assorted Truthmouth material, which put me on his radar; then he very kindly reached out to me, and that sort of got a ball rolling that eventually led to me being cast in the show. I played an assortment of characters: Derek Nimmo, Noel Fielding, an I, Claudius cast member, Russell Brand, and a slew of others. A sheer learning curve but a really charmed experience, working with people I've watched for years - Harry, Paul Whitehouse, Kevin Eldon - great fun.

So what did you want to be originally - a comedian, actor, or journalist?

My interest in comedy began at university, I was in an improv group there; my background is almost entirely in improvisation. Really what kicked things off was being part of Austentatious. The year before, 2012, we came up [to Edinburgh] and had a free show which was a big success, and that felt like a door-opening moment.

How did Austentatious come about?

Four of us had been in the same university group, then two of them came up with the idea of starting a London-based group as we'd all moved there, then we brought two more people on board. All of us are experienced in different ways, but we were astonished how quickly it was picked up. We're doing our second tour from February through April.

I can see it becoming absolutely huge eventually - it's incredibly popular in Edinburgh.

That's the thing about being in a group, it's diffused responsibility. If I went up and did a show and found myself playing the King Dome the next year, I'd probably feel a real sense of pressure, but when you do something with a group that big, it's bigger than all of you. So I think all of us look at its success - we totally sold out the Queen Dome this year - with a sense of bemused gratitude. It's been a wonderful thing.

You'd think it would go down a storm in America too. Is that on the cards?

We're talking about it, nothing's locked in, but we feel that's the next thing to try and do. It's an improv-savvy place, and being Brits, doing something with that regency tang, I feel like with the right organisation it could be a fish/barrel scenario.

Nicely put. Back to your own stuff, and I must admit, having read the initial blurbs about the new show, I assumed it was about the Ukrainian Odessa, not the one in Texas.

Yeah, understandably: there was a point around April or May where the show was pretty much locked in then everything flared up [in Ukraine],and there was certainly a moment of quiet alarm thinking 'what's someone's gut reaction going to be when they see this on the page - if some big atrocity happens in Odessa, will the show be stymied?'

But it didn't really come up, apart from once when I was flyering, a woman said 'ah, the Ukraine' and I said 'no, it's not' and she said 'that's a shame,' refused to take it and walked off. I think she was looking for biting political analysis.

So how would you describe the show?

The best way to describe it is to explain the process a bit. The starting premise was to find a bit of video footage and essentially spend a year building a show around it - working with the constraint of having to inhabit that bit of footage and make something out of it.

The footage I alighted upon was this fairly prosaic and dull chunk of local news from a TV station in Odessa, Texas, from 1983: it's a news report about a local factory fire, then there's a few adverts, some more news reports about staffing changes at a local police station, and that's it, that's the footage. Essentially it's a narrative based on those few moments of footage, where I play all the characters and they're all interrelated.

One review compared it to sampling. Was it directly influenced by the experimental music you're into?

It definitely was in the air. At the time I was writing it there were lots of acts, like The Books I'm a massive fan of: they interpolate little fragments of snatched dialogue or old time music, weird folky songs, build the tracks from audio flotsam. I was really into John Oswald, the guy who invented Plunderphonics, he'd make these mad collages out of high pop culture. So I was interested in these people at the time, and I'm also a massive fan of someone like [US rapper/producer] Madlib, so yeah, sampling really interests me.

Sampling can certainly be a lot more creative than a lot of people assume.

But, to be honest, I think more interesting is that it was always important for me to import the mechanism of improv into writing a show. One thing when I was first starting out that I found really hard was 'do I care enough about what I'm writing about, the topic I've chosen, for this to be an authentic expression?' And I think that's a very hard thing to surmount: 'Is this me?'

Because my background is in improv I was more comfortable if I was given something arbitrary to work with, using that arbitrary starting point and making something out of it. That was a big part of the Truthmouth show and I guess I wanted to explore that in a different way in Odessa.

Found-sounds and improv, there's a bit of alchemy in both of them.

If you're forced outside the box, with your options fairly limited... when I was having to spend a year writing a show with two and a half minutes of footage as the starting point, you have to start thinking laterally, approaching things from different angles. It's a challenge that, when it works, can throw up interesting results.

I'd imagine this show is quite logistically difficult?

It's very labour intensive, I had to teach myself how to edit film, so I was going into my office at the weekends because there's a TV arm, using all the editing equipment there. There's a lot that didn't make the cut, and it took ages.

On one hand it's a real faff, and it limits the gigs you can play. I can't do the two or three gigs a night that lots of stand-ups would, because of portability, and because it's so based on a bit of footage, it's tricky to dissect into chunks to try out at night. But on the other hand, although it was very arduous, it's inspiring because you're challenging yourself to work in a whole different media.

You've learned a whole new skill along the way.

Exactly. And I think if you're just a stand-up, trying to write material, sitting there with a page for eight hours, that'd be really tough. Whereas for me, if I was spending eight hours a day on my show, I'd spend a couple of hours of that editing, or transcribing bits of the video, making a PowerPoint presentation. I was putting in a lot of effort but not all of it was the hard graft of writing. So in a way it gives you a bit more stamina, lots of different jobs, not blank page syndrome.

The stage almost seems a bit old-school for you. With the new editing skills, have you thought about moving into film, maybe?

Well, a lot of my favourite artists have a cross disciplinary angle to what they do, and I think you always want to be approaching things with a slight element of outsiderism: once you're too happy with your particular purview I imagine it becomes less fun, you start to repeat yourself. So I'd love to start working in different media - audio, film, different collaborative projects.

So what will you do next, having progressed quite a bit between the first two shows?

I don't think anything's specifically well formed to talk about yet, but I'm thinking about going back [to Edinburgh] next year. You need to know whether or not you're going by December, and you need to submit your blurb and name by March. I could always go down the David O'Doherty route, having a fairly catch-all title and blurb, then come up with something wonderful.

'Austentatious, Live at The Leicester Square Theatre' is available to buy now. Shop

'Joseph Morpurgo: Odessa' is at the Soho Theatre, 14 - 16th May 2015. Details & Tickets