Steve Roe

Nationalities

Chicago New York City Toronto London Melbourne Calgary Australia Canada United Kingdom United States

RolesFounder

Steve Roe is a British improviser, teacher, and entrepreneur who co-founded Hoopla Impro in London in 2006, building it into the United Kingdom's largest improvisation training school. He trained with Keith Johnstone, Charna Halpern at iO Chicago, Patti Stiles, and Shawn Kinley at Loose Moose Theatre, and has taught at East 15 Drama School, Imperial College London, and Oxford University. Hoopla's early stages incubated ensembles that became Showstoppers! The Improvised Musical, Austentatious, and Mischief Theatre, creators of the West End hit The Play That Goes Wrong.

Roe grew up in Merton, South London, and attended Rutlish High School. Before entering improv, he worked as a management consultant at Accenture in their Communications and High Tech Division and spent five years in television at ITV, BBC2, and Channel 4. He had been writing sketch comedy when he saw a show by The Maydays in Brighton, directed by John Cremer, and realized the performers were funnier improvising than anything he had written. He trained with Cremer's workshops in Brighton, then moved to London to launch his own work.

His training expanded to include Keith Johnstone, Charna Halpern at iO in Chicago, Patti Stiles of Improv Melbourne, Shawn Kinley of Loose Moose Theatre in Calgary, UCB, The Annoyance Theatre, and Crumbs Canada. He also studied mask with Mick Barnfather and clown with Jonathan Kay.

In January 2006 Roe co-founded Hoopla Impro with Edgar Fernando, his friend from Rutlish High School. They began with free weekly workshops at The Bedford pub in Balham, growing rapidly by word of mouth. In 2010 they moved shows to The Miller in London Bridge, described as the UK's first dedicated improv theatre. Hoopla grew into the UK's biggest improvisation training school, teaching thousands of students annually across multiple Central London venues and celebrating its twentieth anniversary in 2026.

Hoopla's early stages served as an incubator for several ensembles that went on to significant commercial success. Showstoppers! The Improvised Musical, Austentatious, and Mischief Theatre (creators of The Play That Goes Wrong, a global hit that has played the West End, Broadway, and toured internationally) all developed within the Hoopla community. Roe eventually left his television career to commit full-time to growing Hoopla.

Roe performs with Music Box: The Improvised Musical (named five-star reviews by Fringe Guru and Remote Goat) and Story Kitchen. He has taught at East 15 Drama School, Imperial College London, and Oxford University. Corporate clients include Google, Facebook, Comedy Central, Accenture, Apple, BBC, and ITV. His specialties include comedy improv in both short-form and narrative formats, mask, Meisner Technique, clown, and commedia dell'arte. His facilitation and consulting work extended across corporate, nonprofit, and educational organizations, applying improv principles to the specific communication and collaboration challenges those institutional contexts present. His long-form background gave him the observation skills and responsive flexibility that effective facilitation requires, and his applied improv practice developed frameworks that make improv principles accessible to participants who have no theatrical background or performance experience.

Historical Context

Roe's founding of Hoopla Impro in 2006 occurred during a period when London's improv scene was small and fragmented compared to the established communities in Chicago, New York, and Toronto. By building an accessible entry point through free workshops and then scaling into a full training school and performance venue, Roe and Fernando helped create the infrastructure that transformed London into one of the world's most active improv cities. The incubation of Mischief Theatre within Hoopla is particularly significant: The Play That Goes Wrong became one of the most commercially successful comedy productions in recent West End history, demonstrating that London's improv community could produce work with global commercial reach.

Roe's training lineage, which spans Johnstone, Halpern, Stiles, Kinley, UCB, and The Annoyance, connects Hoopla to virtually every major stream of English-language improvisation pedagogy. This breadth of influence has given Hoopla a distinctive eclecticism that sets it apart from schools more closely aligned with a single tradition. Roe's career in applied improvisation sits within the broader trajectory of practitioners who moved from performing and coaching work in theatrical improv contexts into facilitation and professional development applications in the 1990s and 2000s. This period saw the formalization of applied improv as a recognized practice domain, with the founding of the Applied Improvisation Network and the emergence of a professional literature on improv's applications to leadership, communication, and organizational effectiveness. Roe's work in this space was part of a generation's effort to articulate what improvisation's principles offer to non-theatrical practitioners and to develop the facilitation frameworks that could make those principles reliably applicable in professional settings. His applied improv practice drew on both the performing tradition's emphasis on presence, listening, and collaborative commitment and the organizational development tradition's concern with measurable skill building and transferable behavioral change.

Legacy

Hoopla Impro's growth into the UK's largest improv training school has made Roe one of the most important figures in British improvisation. The school's role in incubating Showstoppers!, Austentatious, and Mischief Theatre has connected grassroots improv training to West End commercial success, creating a visible pipeline from improv classroom to professional theatre that has elevated the profile of improvisation across the UK entertainment industry.

Hoopla's twentieth anniversary in 2026 marks two decades of sustained growth in a market that had minimal improv infrastructure when the school launched. The thousands of students who have trained at Hoopla represent a community that has fundamentally changed London's relationship to improvised performance, establishing improv as a mainstream recreational and artistic activity rather than a niche pursuit.