Yahoo Finance A funny thing happened on the way here: comedians get personal about their backstage dramas
If you’re making comedy, or funny theatre, what’s the last thing you should include in your show? For years – for most of entertainment history, in fact – the answer would have been: backstage strife. No one wants to see that show about how you’re drifting apart as a double act, how touring live comedy just doesn’t pay the bills, or how your company is in the advanced stages of collapse. Remember that Morecambe and Wise show about the tensions in their off-stage relationship? Of course you don’t. It didn’t happen. It would not have brought you sunshine.
But times change. In the era of autofiction, reality TV and trauma-comedy, the lines between fact and fantasy, onstage and off, blur. For a long time, the duo Max and Ivan were grateful that their chosen artistic niche, narrative sketch comedy, gave them characters and fictions to hide behind. “So many standups feel compelled to mine their inner lives for material,” says one half of the twosome, Max Olesker. “Or they live their lives with half an eye on ‘how does this turn into comedy?’ That can be unhealthy; you can lose sight of the [difference] between you the performer and you the actual person. So I’ve always smugly thought, ‘we’re lucky, we don’t have to exist in that unhealthy space’. Until now, when suddenly we’re trawling through emails, putting personal photos onstage and excavating our lives in more detail than we’ve ever done before.”
He’s talking about the pair’s new show Life, Choices. No spoilers here: suffice to say that, after years of multi-roling their own made-up comic plays, Max and Ivan have now taken their own lives as their subject. The raw material of Life, Choices – sometimes very raw – is the difficulty of sustaining a comedy partnership into middle age, when parenthood, unpaid bills and “a sitcom that got canned” (or, in Olesker’s paraphrase, that’s “still awaiting the second-season call”) all start pulling you in other directions.
Their impulse to dramatise this stuff is not unique. One of Max and Ivan’s occasional directors, comedian Tom Parry, was behind a great example of this sub-genre, when his sketch group Pappy’s staged their Last Show Ever in 2012. That for-the-ages set depicted this trio of idiots growing up and going their separate ways, while celebrating the camaraderie they’d enjoyed along the way. Only last month, performance mavericks Sh!t Theatre staged a work-in-progress of Or What’s Left of Us, which picked the bones out of a year marked by grievous personal and professional loss. This month, those comic theatre mainstays Spymonkey premiere a version of Aristophanes’ The Frogs that happens also to explore the fortunes of a company rocked by the voluntary exile of one member (Petra Massey, left for Las Vegas) and the unexpected early death of another, Stephan Kreiss, in 2021.
After Massey’s departure, the company began devising, with playwright Carl Grose, a version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which one horseman had left to work in Las Vegas. When Kreiss died, that was shelved, leaving the surviving performers, Toby Park and Aitor Basauri, wondering: “what do we do now there’s just two of us? What are we going to do now? And The Frogs came about through that,” says Park. “It’s the first ever double act in the western theatrical canon.” It’s also about a journey to bring a recently deceased, much-missed theatre-maker (Euripides) back from the dead.
“The struggle of these two characters” – Dionysus and his slave Xanthias – “resembles the struggle Toby and I are enduring now Stephan and Petra are not here,” says Basauri. Which might have been enough in a previous age: Spymonkey might have staged the play, and kept their own behind-the-scenes struggles subtextual. But in this production the ancient Greek story (in an adaptation by Grose) is spliced with scenes depicting the company’s disintegration. “We flip back in time in the show to revisit the Spymonkey office,” says Park, “and there’s a little shrine to Stephan and a defaced photograph of Petra.” (“I fear,” he adds, “it’s not going to make Carl many royalties from other companies doing it.”)
Why do this? Why not let Aristophanes do the work? On the one hand, to make theatre in this way – with the stories of the performers as prominent as the story of the play – is consistent with how Spymonkey have always worked. “Whenever you put a group of people onstage,” says Basauri, “you want to consider the dynamics that govern those people.” What’s the story behind the story? “Exactly. There always is one. And if the creators don’t take it into account, they won’t make as good a show.
“It also fits very much with the world of the clown,” he adds – and as a fantastic clown himself, he should know. “The clown will try and tell a story that is important to the clown, even if it’s really bad.”
Max and Ivan had also made prior moves in this direction. Their 2019 show Commitment portrayed the spectacular job Olesker made of organising partner Ivan Gonzalez’s real-world stag do. That hour had a huge emotional payoff, and when the pair looked for the heart in their current circumstances, they couldn’t see past the subject of their early middle age (Gonzalez had recently become a dad), their relationships with their ageing fathers, and the difficulty of mounting, yet again, another Edinburgh show. “It kept coming back to the notion,” says Olesker, “that if we were going to make a show, this is what it had to be about. And to do it justice, we ended up exposing our inner workings in ways we hadn’t before.”
Is that an awkward process? When you watch Life, Choices, you wonder at the candour with which Max and Ivan depict their off-stage relationship. “There are areas of our lives that aren’t in the show,” says Olesker, “and that was the result of negotiation and talking.” There was also stuff in early drafts, says Gonzalez, that felt too real, or insufficiently funny, “so we took it out”. Even the truth has to be fictionalised. “It all is the truth,” he says, “but it’s a selective truth that works for the show.”
Is it a therapeutic process? Well, partly – insofar as, if you wish to address your personal crises onstage, you have to open up about them offstage first. Spymonkey are a bit allergic to therapy-speak: they’re laying themselves bare in The Frogs because it’s funny, not because it’s healing. “We feel that tragedy and comedy are very close together,” in Basauri’s words. But he does admit that the show might “let the emotion run” more than the company’s previous work. “Because we think it’s fine for the audience to experience that in a theatre show, with a story that explores the pain that comes from losing a friend. And then we’ll break it with comic relief, in the best sense of that phrase.”
The risk here, of course, is self-indulgence – and both parties express their aversion to navel-gazing in the strongest possible terms. “We didn’t want anyone to have to actually care about the economics of putting on a two-man narrative comedy show,” says Max Olesker. “We want to be accessible to people who’ve never seen us before,” says Gonzalez. “Lots of people have to grow up and deal with adult life – not just us.”
Spymonkey – half a generation Max and Ivan’s seniors – have no doubt their predicament is relatable, because it’s about “ageing white men in crisis”, says Park. “To be getting older as white men, not knowing how we fit and re-evaluating where we are feels like a worthwhile thing to be engaged in right now.” He speaks for both companies – for all artists making this kind of work – when he says, “if all the frustration and not knowing how to re-make ourselves and how to cope with loss means something to us, we have to trust that we’re not alone” and that it means something to audiences too.
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It surely will – because 21st-century audiences get a charge out of “the truth”, whether or not it’s in a complex dance with (2,500-year-old) fiction. Such is our particular cultural moment, whose currents pull towards identity and authenticity (some would say solipsism), while metaphor is going out of fashion. The artists involved are wise to those currents (“the exposedness and the realness felt like an exciting thing to play around with,” says Olesker), but aren’t in their thrall. “Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s worth performing,” says Gonzalez, while Spymonkey defend their decision to filter real-world problems through ancient Greek fiction. “It’s more fun to have a story to tell,” says Park, “then that story gets overlaid with your own stories and situations. And then there’s the theatricality. We’ve always had lots of fun trying to make ‘good theatre’ and failing, and that being our type of clown.”
“Perhaps that’s what we should learn how to do now,” he adds, a little ruefully: “make a show out of just us.” After all, the company is casting around for a new role. But that wouldn’t work, sighs Basauri. Real-world truth works best in small doses. “For some people, if they bring an amazing personality to bear, the truth might be enough. But me, I’m very boring offstage,” he deadpans. “Toby and I, we’re funny onstage, but in real life we are pretty boring.”
• Max and Ivan’s Life, Choices is at Soho theatre, London, 15-20 January. The Frogs is at Royal & Derngate, Northampton, 19 January-3 February.
