Tough Time, Nice Time

Published Friday 15 February 2008 at 17:25 by William McEvoy

Jon Haynes and David Woods’ Ridiculusmus has built up a cult following over the past 15 years, celebrated with a retrospective and this newly commissioned piece at the Barbican. Haynes and Woods play two gay men sitting in a bathtub in a Bangkok sauna. The set is starkly side lit and the focus throughout is on the actors from the waist up. It’s a jarring, jaunty, cerebral and sometimes surreal piece connecting sex, violence, cinema, story telling and genocide.

Sounds like strong stuff, but it’s all given a dose of postmodern irony as references to popular films show how characters escape into cinematic worlds and lose touch with their own lives. Martin, a Bangkok resident, has powerful, autobiographical stories to tell, and Stefan is an avid listener. But the stories falter and digress, language follows its own twists and turns, the violent and lurid rub shoulders with the flippant and chatty.

The work’s collage of tones is intriguing, the humour acerbic and acute. The actors perform with a kind of detached eloquence, shifting rhythm and volume in a constant ebb and flow of words. Sudden allusions to genocide or anti-Semitism pull you up short - there’s real political insight here, but also a nuanced reflection on a world that has lost its ethical grounding in a postmodern hall of mirrors.