23-May-2011
Whatsonstage.com
Laura Tosney
4

Ridiculusmus’ Total Football is as much a biting indictment of Britain today as it is a farcical comedy. This two-handed satire, set in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, depicts the journey of a rather unctuous Under Secretary for Sport and Culture’s ill thought-out plan to rouse British patriotism through the game of football…and the hapless bureaucrats lumbered with the task of making it work.

Amid pops of physicality and driving beats, David Woods and Jon Haynes keep hammering home the jokes. Jokes that, while funny, occasionally hit a little close to the bone. Both are excellent in this frenetically paced show, with both Woods shining as the Under Secretary, playing him to a smarmy – and slightly scary – tee, and Haynes as the boring, money-grubbing underling whose personal secrets somehow keep escaping during press conferences.

In George Tomlinson’s bleak portacabin-esque set, the piece moves from surreal FatBoy Slim style dances to all-too-real deconstructions of British identity with ease. To be fair, cracking wise at the deluded tribal instincts of Britain during large sporting tournaments is nothing new. But the pair are witty enough make it work, keeping the audience with them throughout. And, despite being entirely concocted of short, snappy scenes the plot manages to pull the audience along with just enough fluency to make sense. Though the ending may be a little anti-climactic, Total Football is, on the whole, superb.

A quirky show, you no more need to be interested in football to see it than you do curling, and if you only spend 70 minutes in a theatre before 18 June, be sure to spend them here. And by the curtain, if you take away nothing about multicultural Britain and its puppeteering politicians, you’ll at least be guaranteed a good lung workout.

20-May-2011
Evening Standard
Henry Hitching
4

You don’t need to give a fig about football to enjoy this inventive, hectic 70-minute piece, in which Jon Haynes and David Woods, otherwise known as Ridiculusmus, use sport to explore ideas of national identity.

The creation of a British football team for the 2012 Games is a chance to unpack the ambiguities of Britishness. One character observes that “we’re a small country with a rather large ego and winning might actually throw it out of control”.

The cynical, clumsy approach of the civil servants masterminding the project means winning never looks likely.

Scenes of bureaucratic chaos alternate with the bizarre: a homage to Wayne Rooney combines dance and drum’n‘bass, a government spokesman intersperses apologies with details of his infertility, an immigrant cleaner exhibits his cock-eyed love of all things British.

Fans of the BBC sitcom Twenty Twelve will lap up the satire on blundering “experts” and their hopeless strategies. There’s plenty more to admire – not least the vigorous performances of Haynes and Woods and George Tomlinson’s memorably frangible design. While elements of the production lack fluency and there’s a less than clinical finish, this slice of the absurd has a real lightness of touch.

20-May-2011
Financial Times Review
Sarah Hemming
4

Anyone approaching Ridiculusmus’s Total Football in the hope of clarifying the offside rule may emerge disappointed. Their explanation – “it’s, um, basically when someone’s not on the side, which means they’re off the side” – is unlikely to impress any football fans’ forum. But in most other respects this wry look at British identity through the lens of football is bang on target: droll, daft and deft.

The comic duo (Jon Haynes and David Woods) fashion a sort of narrative around the hapless attempts to form a British football team for the 2012 Olympics. Roger (Woods), a jargon-spouting government official, tasks Brian (Haynes), a bureaucrat, with the job of assembling a team and finding out how football and national well-being are connected. Would a win for Team GB ensure an upsurge in national self-esteem and happiness? Could the tribal passion for the game be bolted on to national identity? Unfortunately Brian, a buttoned-up little man, is football proof, mystified by the global appeal of “22 millionaires ruining a lawn”, and spends much of his time struggling to get to grips with the rules.

But en route to inevitable disaster, the show mulls on what it means to be British and how we determine identity: serious questions handled with absurd flair. The swift changes of setting and style reflect the slipperiness of the task in hand. Brian attempts to cultivate an estuarine accent, struggles to persuade the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish to join the fun and ponders national treasures such as Alan Bennett, Wensleydale cheese and David Beckham’s foot. He seeks help from Miggy, an Algerian who is applying for British citizenship. “What are the five core British values?” asks Brian. “Marks and Spencer, Tesco…” replies Miggy.

Haynes and Woods pass and move neatly, slipping from role to role without losing their basic formation. They interweave dialogue with comic, football-inspired dance routines – jostling, despairing, rolling on the ground – as they consider the complexity of identity and the problems of a state attempt to instil national pride and happiness. Their finishing is sometimes a bit rough and their timing a bit hectic, but overall this is an entertaining match with some nice curling shots.

23-May-2011
Time Out
Andrzej Lukowski
4

Ridiculusmus – aka David Woods and Jon Haynes – have been launching surreal probes into the nature of Britishness for nearly 20 years. Their latest show ends with its key image: two middle-aged, middle-class men who hate football and each other, conversing inaccurately about the beautiful game while half-heartedly trying to fish.

You’ll get more out of the duo’s first piece in three years if you know enough about footie to find Haynes’s Alex Ferguson impression funny, but ‘Total Football’ is not about the sport per se.

Performed on a drab utilitarian set by the grey-suited pair, it’s pointedly removed from the guts and the glory of the pitch. Loosely speaking, it takes the shape of a political satire, in which deadpan Hayes’s dullard civil servant Brian is tasked by Woods’s malevolent ‘Undersecretary of State for Sport and the Arts and Culture in England’ with masterminding a winning football team for the 2012 Olympics.

Lazy, inept and utterly uninterested in any sport bar tennis, Brian makes a token effort to solicit advice from Arsenal-supporting colleague Nigel and Argentinian cleaner Miggy. It doesn’t help: the all-English ‘British’ team fail, an outcome the show tosses off as being entirely inevitable.

Rich in gags, ‘Total Football’s 70-minute length pulses with symbolism, subtext and questions about national identity. This post-match analysis can only scratch the surface, I fear, but the play’s principal suggestion is that talking about football gives English middle-class men something to say to each other, at least.

It’s an amusing conclusion; typically, though, Ridiculusmus formulate it not as a fond observation on English eccentricity, but an unsettling home truth.

Read more:

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/performing-arts/theatre-reviews-april-in-paris-driving-manuel-1-2848209

21-Mar-2013
Herald Scotland
Web link to article
4

So it’s probably just as well this latest cunningly droll escapade from Ridiculusmus is a squinty-eyed look at how what happens on the pitch can be used to explore what TeamGB (and the national identity it bends into a brand) amounts to off the field.

David Woods and Jon Haynes – still the acting core of TeamRidiculusmus – devised and wrote this two-hander under the influence of the 2010 World Cup and the early days run-up to London’s 2012 Olympics. In the main, they play a couple of dark-suited civil servants charged with creating a football team capable of winning gold at the Olympics. It’s tempting to say “don’t laugh” but that’s exactly what you do as Roger (Woods) blind sides his chosen fall guy, Brian (Haynes), with fatuous politico-guff on the feelgood factor of winning, archly speckled through with footie terms and the aura of superiority that allows one self-serving mediocrity to chivvy a lower-ranking bureaucrat into a task he knows nothing about. The hapless Brian is clueless about football. It’s doubtful if he knows much about the rough and tumble of life outside his own fastidiously narrow experiences – otherwise why quiz Miggy (Woods, as the Algerian cleaner applying for British citizenship) about British values?

If there’s a lot of sharply pointed humour twisted into this scenario, there are deeper issues lurking to ambush your assumptions about identity, be it national or personal, genetic or (like Miggy) acquired. Footballing quiddities are the least of it here. Instead there is a fast-paced, wickedly astute comedy of mind games that show TeamGB forever scoring own goals.