Tough Time, Nice Time
Barbican, London

Frighteningly truthful … Jon Haynes and David Woods in Tough Time, Nice Time.

Two naked Germans share a Jacuzzi in Bangkok and talk. Martin, a nervy lawyer, says he has stories to tell, but is worried that they might be stolen. The other, who says he is a publisher and whose grandfather was in the SS, is writing the stories down. But who is to say what is true in this slippery world of unreliable narrators? It becomes clear that this telling of stories owes more to the Hollywood pitch than to friendship. Indeed, part of the interest here is in the dynamic between two deeply unpleasant men who, in revealing everything, reveal nothing. They needle each other and yet never make any connection. The bathhouse, with its gurgling water and steam, is like a hell where these lost souls drift. Stories, we often think, define us. In the theatre, in particular, the idea of sharing stories in the dark is held up as something fundamental that makes us human. But what if all our stories have been misappropriated? What if we can no longer distinguish between Ariel Sharon and Sharon Stone, between One Day in September and a real terrorist attack? What if the Holocaust is no longer a historical event in our minds but a TV miniseries? That ordinary lives are not worth hearing about unless they can be packaged into a misery memoir?
A few years back, in Stitching, Anthony Neilson explored what happens to our relationships and our sex lives when our imaginations become colonised by pornography. In this bleak, uncomfortable 75 minutes, Ridiculusmus go further and question what happens to memory and who we really are, if our stories are no longer our own. Tough, not nice at all and frighteningly truthful.

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.