Bulls in a china shop
| Bulls in a china shop |
| Written by Garrett Bithell |
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The upstairs stage at Belvoir Street Theatre has been hijacked by tearaway UK comedy duo Ridiculusmus, comprising Jon Haynes and David Woods, who are bringing two productions, back to back, to unwitting Sydney audiences. Absurd, nonsensical, puerile and brilliant all at once, the pair is a runaway hit everywhere they go. First up, and on at the moment, is The Importance of Being Earnest. But, a conventional production of Oscar Wilde’s classic text this is not. Haynes and Woods play Jack, Algernon, Cecily, not to mention Lady Bracknell, Miss Prism – and all the other characters as well. Lauded around the world, the mayhem of their virtuoso character turns and theatrical invention provides an entirely new way to experience Wilde’s play. “It’s a departure for us to do a script by somebody else,” Haynes tells SX. “We’ve been making our own work since about 1996. So we decided as an experiment to do a pre-scripted play, and I suppose we wanted to reach a bigger audience as well. We’d been constantly on the fringe – we still are – but it’s quite nice being there really. “But it was an attempt to do something more populist, and so it’s worked in that respect. But if people come back to see the next show having seen The Importance of Being Earnest, I think they’re going to get a bit of a shock, because it’s very different.” Indeed, that show is Tough Time, Nice Time, and the silver tea-set delivery of Wilde will give way to the drivelling banter of a pair of German sex tourists. Set entirely in a jacuzzi in Bangkok, the play was called ‘an acutely and hilariously observed snapshot of a world going rapidly down the plughole’ after its world premiere at London’s Barbican. It’s deadly serious theatre that is seriously funny. “Every time we make a new show we kind of set ourselves a new dogma,” Haynes says. “This time we wanted to have a change from doing quite explicit comedy to doing something where the first impulse wasn’t to be funny, but it was actually quite a serious impulse and maybe comedy will arise from it. “We touch on a lot of things in this play – movies, celebrities, genocide, drugs, storytelling, the art of storytelling. It’s such a jumble – it’s like this soup. Everything is in there. And if that is a reflection of today, well then maybe that’s what we’re saying. We’re just bombarded with so much we end up in this complete whirlwind of bollocks and we start to sink in it.” Celebrating their 15th anniversary as Ridiculusmus this year, Haynes and Woods, who both have PhDs in comedy theatre, met at university and started out busking in the London Underground. “We’re just a very efficient working unit,” Haynes muses. “We’re very, very different, and that works creatively and from an audience point of view as well – we cater to the different tastes out there. Some people like him, some people like me, some people like both, some people don’t like either of us! “The prerogative is to entertain people and for us to enjoy ourselves. If we stopped enjoying it then we would stop doing it. We often have discussions about comedy. He’s very into comedy and I’m less so – at least I profess to be less so. If you asked David, he would say that actually I’m a very well-developed comedian but I just try to deny it. “We do always have this emphasis on comedy. Even if we try not to be funny, we end up being funny, and I don’t know what that says about us – whether we are just addicted to the response of laughter or whether we just can’t help it. In Tough Time, Nic After Haynes and Woods leave the hallowed surrounds of Belvoir Street Theatre, they will tour Tough Time, Nice Time in the UK. Then it’s back to work on a new production – one that aims for the top of British high society, the Royal Family. We shall wait with bated breath.
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They have been called masters of comic invention. And now, Sydney audiences are lapping up the medley of madness that is Ridiculusmus. Jon Haynes, the queer half of the comedy duo, sat down with Garrett Bithell. 
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