Financial Times, London 2003
Ideas Men
The Pit, Barbican, London
Ridiculusmus – the comic duo consisting of David Woods and Jon Hough – has long relished taking ideas that were already daft and torquing them into unexpected, hyper-ludicrous configurations. In a delicious synergy, in 1997 The Exhibitionists, the pair’s show about art gallery guards staving off boredom while on duty, was staged amid a Yoko Ono exhibition; a couple of years ago a planned retrospective season was kiboshed when Hough’s lung collapsed, so in a couple of days they put together a show about collapsed lungs to fill the slot. Their reputation has steadily grown to the point where their latest piece, Ideas Men, can occupy a four-week run in the BITE strand at The Pit.
Their shows are always worth a look, but this is not one of their most brilliant. It seemed to start from a similar point to The Exhibitionists : a couple of creative consultants faffing around in various ways to try and come up with the next big notion and/or pass the time until it comes along.
There was a touch of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross in there, too, with a competition where the winner gets a big money prize and the loser gets the sack, and the theft (several times over) of the winning idea. Also present were Hough and Woods’s fondness for planned mistakes (apparent line fluffs that are really scripted, and so on) and for playing around with metatheatricality and an ambiguity of focus, so that we often cannot tell how many layers of fiction are being presented at once.
But the numerous giggles and clevernesses did not coalesce into a big laugh or a great insight. Maybe that’s the point of the show: that it enacts what it portrays; that, as the clock on the back wall shows, this is nothing more than a way of filling in an hour by knocking around ideas that don’t ultimately go anywhere. I think they intend something more than amiably bonkers diversion, and I think it is not quite there.
Financial Times, 8 October 2003
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