Sunday Times, London 2003
Ideas Men, Barbican
12 October 2003
“Creativity does have a temperature,” says David Woods, halfway through Ridiculusmus’s Ideas Men, “and it’s something like the temperature in this room.”
Terrifyingly, this quote is drawn from real life, from the mouth of one of the men this short, sharp burst of invective sets out to mock. Part slapstick physical theatre, part bleak satire, Ideas Men follows an empty morning in the empty heads of two desk jockeys in the ideas department of a vast, unnamed corporation. Desperate for something — anything — to kick off a profitable train of thought, they role-play, bickering and bantering like Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir, eternally waiting on salvation. Nothing comes, of course, even when they resort to stealing inspiration from a book called 101 Great Ideas. In despair, they resort to violence, until they are left, droning on and on and on about de Bono, tension, doodling and brainstorming for ever and ever.
During this project’s evolution, Woods and the company’s other member, Jon Hough, attended several corporate workshops, where insane games both amused and horrified them. Woods and Hough are at their strongest when this culture of small minds and small ideas angers them the most. At other times, albeit briefly, you can sense endless afternoons in rehearsal rooms, spent fumbling for the connective tissue of a piece they seem to struggle to conclude. Despite these breaks in concentration, Ideas Men seems the first British satire that successfully derides this grim feature of our superficial century.
Go with someone who works in advertising.
Stephen Armstrong
Related pages: