Theatre in Wales, 2004
Ideas Men, Ridiculusmus
Aberystwyth Arts Centre
January 23, 2004
It’s 9. a.m., according to the silently ticking wall clock, and Liam Brady (Jon Hough) and Mark Mullett (Dan Woods) are trying to generate ideas for their City-based company. This is because they are Ideas Men. No, there are no Ideas Women. What an idea. Nor ‘Ideas People.’ Don’t give yourself any ideas. Get the idea?
Very amusingly, Liam and Mark haven’t got the idea. They haven’t got any ideas. That is why, in the 2003 Peter Brook Open Space award-winning play Ideas Men, they are spending this workday morning in ‘role play.’ That concept translates as wheelie chair racing, Duplo blocks, sadistic power games, sex games, plagiarism, blackmail, violence to people and property, and other kinds of unprofessionalism and ineffectual anarchy.
Supremely unhelpful to them, their role-play is hysterically funny from an outsider’s point of view, as the audience’s full and continuous laughter confirmed. The actors are verbally and physically acrobatic. Ridiculusmus’s mixture of stiff-faced Monty Python decorum and Beckettian comedy of futility pits the amused audience against characters who are clearly not enjoying themselves. Ominously, the only marketable ‘idea’ they find is called ‘Icarus’—the ancient Greek mythological character who strapped on invented wings, flew too close to the sun, and fell out of the sky to his death. Of course, Mike and Liam, conscious of their ‘role-play’ assignment, may be in on the joke. Or not.
While satirizing the commercialization of ideas and ‘creative potential,’ Ridiculusmus also pokes fun at the equally familiar scenario of imaginatively bankrupt artists hiding behind ideas that aren’t. In a furious brainstorming session, Liam and Mike do some free-association drawing on large pieces of invitingly blank paper. Mike comes up with six identical drawings of male genitalia, none showing much skill or originality. Liam produces a solitary picture of a rectangle. Turner Prize committee beware. Without taking themselves too seriously, they also explore such matters as the forms, origins, processes and purposes of creativity.
Ridiculusmus’s costumes are perfect for the characters. Liam and Mike wear boxy grey suits that Patrick Bateman would adore, with obviously artificial wigs that look like they’ve been borrowed from a television period film and not cleaned. The set design contributes to the ambience of pestilential aggravation. The white upstage wall is sponge-painted with a dizzy series of ‘motivation words’ and management jargon in an almost illegible shade of poison green. In Ideas Men, Liam and Mike’s creative potential fails to take flight, but Ridiculusmus positively soars.
Rebecca Nesvet, Theatre in Wales
Related pages:
.. Sunday Times, London 2003 .. Financial Times, London 2003