If the idea of two naked Germans sitting opposite each other in a bath in a Bangkok gay sauna sounds a promising theatrical situation to you, then Tough Time, Nice Time may well prove a long, disappointing anticlimax.
Ridiculusmus, the two-man, 15-year-old theatre company that with becoming modesty describes its work as "seriously funny ... deadly serious... bold, original and unique" challenges this self-assessment by mounting an anniversary show living up to none of these adjectives or adverbs.
The show appears designed as a meditation on the business of storytelling and on the sado-masochistic experiences or fantasies of those sauna-savouring characters, played by Ridiculusmus's David Woods and Jon Haynes. These shaven-headed men chat about their life stories, in which gay sex serves as a running motif, and about the films and film stars that touch their lives. Cruelty and violence, whether perpetrated by individuals, groups and countries, predictably fascinates them.
A programme quotation from Jennie Erdal's Ghosting - "All storytellers are liars" - gives a hint of how the show is slanted.
For right at the beginning Jon Haynes's Martin, a 40-something German lawyer and expatriate in Bangkok who sells Ecstasy to tourists tells David Woods's slightly younger Stefan, a busy ghost writer, that he wants to have his own "stories" turned into a book.
Martin's distasteful life-story, as he intermittently tells it, is that of a sexually exploitative voyager through Bangkok's sex-trade world: he watches a suicidal boyfriend bleed to death and describes a one-night stand who mysteriously dies in his house.
Stefan, who seems unsure whether it was his father or grandfather who served in the SS, reacts to these revelations with the simple-minded enthusiasm of a Marquis de Sade character. "I like to see people suffer. It gives me great pleasure," he says. Do people today really talk like that? Or are the stories mere fantasies, stratagems in a tentative seduction ritual played out by the two men, both of whom deny their gayness? Is Martin's confession of a neglectful, defecting mother supposed to offer a glib explanation? I found it hard to muster interest in characters of such psychological crudity and caricatured shallowness, though first-nighters relished the show's black comedy/bad taste aspects. Haynes together with Woods, who projects his voice poorly, act their heavy-handed roles as if they believed in them.
Until 15 March. Information: 0845 120 7550.
Tough Time, Nice Time
Barbican: The Pit
Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
