Some actors might have construed The Bedroom Exercise, a concept show at the ADC’s Larkum studio next week, as too daunting in its ambition. Six nights of total improvisation, each performance starting where the previous one left off, so that the show runs in its entirety from the first session to the last. Hellie Cranney and Will Attenborough, however, as the couple whose bedroom life the audience will, literally, be allowed a window into, are far from intimidated. In fact, the whole project was Cranney’s idea. Following a summer spent taking part in The Complex: Oedipus and Electra at the Edinburgh Fringe, she became engrossed in the idea of naturalistic improvisation. After the experience of The Complex, where actors enacted their character’s unseen experiences in real time off-stage, she stumbled upon a RADA blog, detailing an exercise in which students would bring their bedroom to class and ‘just be’. It was from desire to “take the performative nature out of acting” that this project spiralled into what it is today.

Such is the cast and the director’s commitment and attention to detail, alongside creating a unique audience experience out of the bedroom in question, that they debated staging the whole affair in a hired hotel, just to convey that level of total, almost uncomfortable intimacy and intrusion. In the end, co-director Celine Lowenthal came up with the concept of ‘frame flats’, something the cast jokingly predict will one day become a stalwart of theatrical design. In summary, they have roped in the talents of three architecture students to construct an entire room within the studio, complete with all four walls and a ceiling. From two sides of this, long, wide panels have been cut that will allow the audience, seated outside this real-life bedroom, a 180 degree view of Cranney and Attenborough. The nature of the set is such that it not only adds intimacy to the production but also necessitates a more intimate audience. Lowenthal and Wilson, the second director, have limited seats to a mere fifteen a night. As Lowenthal explains, this does seem less restricted if you consider the week long nature of the exercise.

How, though, did the company go about preparing for such an unpredictable and unconfined project? There were, of course, the usual improvised mechanical exercises to bring everybody up to scratch, but then there was the rather less traditional trip to London to work out where Nina and Charlie, the couple in question, actually live. (Raines Park, Wimbledon if you’re interested.) Attenborough and Cranney also had to build not just a backstory, but the whole relationship that will take them up to the point of the first show. They have improvised, or lived through, the first time they met and moved in and their first major argument. All the experiences of a normal relationship have gone into the foundations of the one that audiences can witness next week.

For the directors, the whole nature of the show poses an intricate set of problems. They can’t dictate rehearsals or influence what happens on opening night. Nothing can be predicted or pre-empted. It is all part, as Lowenthal admits, of the “difficult tension between creating something dramatic or naturalistic.”  One way around this was for the directors to create alter-egos who could interact with their stars. Mostly though, rehearsals were conducted in coffee shops or in bed and spent discussing and living out the very fibre of these characters. Care had to be taken – any false, unsubstantiated memory or improvisation could be misleading.

Attenborough talks about his fear of simply building a character that was just him in another form – striking the delicate balance between identifying with Charlie and understanding that he did things differently: “You can’t have too many points of contact.” For Cranney, finding Nina’s unique accent and pattern of speech helped solidify her separation and existence as a distinct character.

They both admit, however, that “there’s just no end in sight.” Unconstrained by scripts or predestined journeys, no one can predict the paths that will be taken by Charlie and Nina come opening night, especially not the cast. The point of the show’s rolling style is to allow for this unpredictability and offer the audience a brief moment’s perspective into the lives of these on going, indefinite characters. The Bedroom Exercise is, the cast admit, “not really a show” but maybe this kind of experimentation is exactly what Cambridge drama needs. After all, as Cranney points out, student theatre is the time to be brave.