A life with Lumley

First Night Lifegame, Lyric Theatre, London

IT IS not easy to pass judgement on Lifegame. Every night, a different guest is invited to watch and oversee Improbable Theatre Company's instant, improvised enactment of choice moments from his or her life story. Last night it was Joanna Lumley who received the while-you-wait dramatic treatment. What resulted was a warmhearted affair, by turns boisterously hilarious and quietly moving, as her frank autobiographical reminiscences were vividly staged by seven indisputably talented performers.

Despite the acclaim that has met Improbable's previous shows, Lifegame is no dead cert. The format could be described as a cross between This Is Your Life and In the Psychiatrist's Chair.

Getting Ms Lumley on board was a coup, not just because of the lure of celebrity but because of her articulacy and candour; even though she was ostensibly a bystander, she stole the show.

At first it all seemed incredibly cringe-making - like a rehearsal in progress; the show is based on workshop ideas by the improvisation guru Keith Johnstone. The man asking the questions came over like an earnest vicar at a tea party as he requested Ms Lumley's philosophy of life, which she gave as "life is wonderful and unexpected", a bland statement that was reverently scrawled onto a blackboard.

The company, with their jeans and shirts and perfect postures, resembled brain-washed members of a cult. And the first tableau they tried to create, surrounding her earliest memory of looking at trees in Cashmere, immediately stalled.

But the sheer force of the Ms Lumley personality began to infect the acting area and, particularly, Stella Duffy, who had been chosen to play her. Before we knew it we were being whisked headlong through her awakening consciousness, one minute joining her at a table with all the family fixating on ponies, another imagining her mother and father's first meeting. The actors then went on to tackle her first crush (rendered as a Shakespearean pastiche) and her first love, transformed into a musical number.

If anyone had come hoping for gossip about the New Avengers or Sapphire and Steel, they would have been disappointed. That Ms Lumley is a star became irrelevant.

We left her on "a high bright hill" (actually atop a ladder), still chain- smoking and cheating death. If every performance of Lifegame is as memorable as this, Improbable will probably last a very long while themselves.