Tough time, nice time: Barbican Pit
Ridiculusmus, a two-man British company currently celebrating its 15th anniversary, has a reputation for making work that is both innovative and bonkers. The latest production by David Woods and Jon Haynes finds them sitting in a bathtub for a little more than an hour talking about subjects ranging from popular films to (mostly gay) sex to genocide. Their deceptively rambling, beer-fuelled conversation is, at times, scabrously funny and yet, at bottom, deadly serious and painfully bleak.
We join them mid-flow, gradually learning that Haynes’s Martin is a drug-peddling lawyer and former rent-boy and Woods’s jaded Stefan a married (to a woman) writer. Both men are, tellingly, interlopers (German) in a developing country. They have met in a sauna in Bangkok, hence the bathtub setting. And, as can happen when strangers connect in such a concentrated situation, their chat seems a mixture of blunt bravado, self-exposure and evasive fabrication.
The actors, who are also co-authors, have succeeded brilliantly in their intention to create two “utterly repellent” characters that are the products of both their particular circumstances and of our times. Speaking in a fast, clipped rhythm, Martin is a partial prude desperate to tell his stories to the sleazily laid-back Stefan.
The pointed script is liberally peppered with oddball zingers, from a brief description of wet frogs rolled in talcum powder as a means of divining winning lottery numbers to a fantasy about licking frozen penis lollies.
Other juicily inventive lines are too rude to be printed here. Suffice to say that theatregoers of a more delicate sensibility could be in for a rough ride.
But Tough time, nice time is not designed merely to offend. Its black humour and knowing use of Schadenfreude neatly remind us of how overloaded we are with celebrity-obsessed tittle-tattle or recycled opinions on mass culture, living our lives via Palm Pilots, mobile phones and conspicuous consumption while the world burns and bleeds. A new message? No, but one that Ridiculusmus reiterates with a dark, vital wit.