ARTicles vol.5 i.2bc: Playing in Earnest

 Gideon Lester talks to Jon Haynes, one half of Ridiculusmus, the British comic duo who are playing all the parts in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Gideon Lester: Ridiculusmus consists of two performers, you and David Woods. When did you begin working together?

Jon Haynes: I met David in 1992 at the Poor School, a drama school in London for poor people. With our friend Angus we formed a sort of busking trio, performing comic songs from the twenties and thirties on the Tube and in the street. It was an early example of our anti-comedy. Then we started a comedy club called the Tomato Club in a little room above a restaurant. Again it was anti-comedy, almost Dadaist; our advertisements for the show said, “Don’t Come!” and asked for bad comedians to turn up and perform. The show included a Tomato Spot when we’d get volunteers to come up and tell bad jokes, or even good jokes, and we’d arm the audience with overripe tomatoes so they could pelt the comedian, who was often wearing protective gear. It got quite a reputation and a lot of comics didn’t like it. We had complaints from stand-ups saying we were giving comedy a bad name. We had to leave in the end because we had complaints from the restaurant downstairs about the tomato seeds not being cleaned up. But it’s where we got our training.

G.L.: What do you mean by “anti-comedy”?

J.H.: We weren’t conventionally funny – in fact I’ve always had a problem with the label “comic.” I’m more of the belief that if I’m funny it’s accidental. I’d rather it be like that, that actually I’m trying to be deadly serious. But I suppose I have a strong comic sensibility, so I can see when people are laughing and use it. We don’t do stand-up comedy. We don’t tell jokes. When people see us perform, they often don’t know whether to laugh or not, or they laugh behind their hands, like the Japanese do. David takes all this very seriously – he’s even written a PhD on it.

G.L.: When did you form Ridiculusmus?

J.H.: We were in our last semester at the Poor School, and one day a fringe theatre company phoned and said they’d had a cancellation for a three-week slot, and did any students want to do a show? David was standing in the vicinity of the phone and said to the principal, yes, we’ve got a show, we’ll do it. In fact we hadn’t got a show at all, but David, ever the entrepreneur, said to us, why don’t we do Three Men in a Boat, based on the novel by Jerome K. Jerome, because there are three of us, and he’d just given a copy of it as a present to somebody so it was in his mind. We had about two weeks to get the show together. We used all the comic songs we’d been doing, and we had cardboard cutout props, and three suitcases made in the shape of a boat, which we carried around with all the props in and we’d just throw them down and they’d become a boat. It was quite good.

G.L.: Where did the name Ridiculusmus come from?

J.H.: When we were at the Poor School, the man on the phone said he needed a name for us. So we asked people for suggestions, and one of the students, who was a former Classics teacher, said, “What about Ridiculus Mus?” He said it was from the poet Horace. [It’s a quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica, and means “ridiculous mouse.”] We said, yeah, that sounds okay, so it became our name. We were briefly joined by a couple of other performers – in 1997 five of us staged The Third Policeman, adapted from Flann O’Brien’s novel – but after that it’s been just Dave and me.

G.L.: Do the two of you have a constant performance persona, or does it change from project to project?

J.H.: People often say that we’re a double act, with Dave as the funny man and me the straight man, but we do try and vary it.

G.L.: Most of your material you write yourself, or adapt from novels. The Importance of Being Earnest is the first existing play the two of you have worked on. How did that come about?

J.H.: We were performing two shows at the Barbican in London in 2001, and the director Jude Kelly came to see them and became a fan. We asked her to direct us in something – we’d never worked with a director before – and she agreed. She suggested we look at Restoration Comedies, but in the end we settled on Wilde.

G.L.: Why?

J.H.: One reason was that I’d memorized the text when I was a teenager. I’d been a Wilde nut for about four years by the end of fourteen, and I had a tape recording of a BBC production with Dame Fabia Drake, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, a young Prunella Scales, and Celia Johnson. I’d had the tape for years and I listened to it so much that I learned the whole thing.

G.L.: Was it always the idea that you and David would play all the parts?

J.H.: Yes. Ridiculusmus is now always just the two of us – we always play all the parts. For us it wasn’t strange, but maybe it is for people who have never seen us before.

G.L.: How was it meeting the play again after so many years?

J.H.: Interesting. David and I both try to keep a level of reality, not to go over the top in our performances. But Earnest isn’t really a naturalistic play. So much of it is in Wilde’s voice; the characters all sound more or less the same. They all speak in epigrams. It’s a bit like Joe Orton; it’s hard to feel sympathetic towards anyone. The heroines, for example, can easily become finger-sucking, petticoat-rustling grotesques. The play has a great artificiality. It’s like Wilde’s hair – very carefully disarranged.

G.L.: Critics often say that beneath the surface comedy, it’s a very angry play.

J.H.: It’s not as poisonous now as it must have been when Wilde wrote it, but it still does have an ability to shock you. Some of the lines are really horrible. “I have no sympathy for invalids.” “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.” Sometimes the audience still gasps.

Gideon Lester is the A.R.T.’s Associate Artistic Director.

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