Features Q&A and Interviews Published 20 May 2011

Ridiculusmus

2011 marks the 18th birthday of innovative theatre company Ridiculusmus. We speak to David Woods and Jon Haynes about their latest work, Total Football, which opens at the Barbican this month.
Honour Bayes

The thing that marks them out as a company is their ability to be simultaneously silly and serious. Nowhere is this duality more perfectly captured than in the company’s articulation of their methods. The list reads thusly: Attitude, Reality, Sensitivity, Edge, Focus, Listen, Open (your heart) and Play. The handy acronym for which is ARSEFLOP.

Total Football, their latest piece, commissioned by the Barbican, seems to expand on the list above. “Football is a metaphor, it’s not really a show about football; we’re using it as an examination of identity in society. The football is a skeleton but it’s a very enjoyable skeleton.” Woods laughs. “You mustn’t get your hopes up that it is 90 minutes of kick about. We’re scrabbling around for lost national identity.” Well thank god for that, because I’m certainly not a football fan, but then neither are they: “Jon definitely isn’t a football fan. I would occasionally watch a match but didn’t care who was playing, I would ally myself with the team who was playing sexy football as they call it.”

Total Football

Ridiculusmus in Total Football

Sexy football does sound pretty exciting, with the idea of total football sounding even more so. This tactical style was pioneered by the Dutch in the 1970s and basically involves a carousel technique where all the players swap positions throughout the game. Woods admiration is clear “It requires an incredible athleticism”¦this idea of inter-changeability and fluidity that the English games weren’t even thinking about” and he seems to see it as a methodology for life “”¦we’re stronger when we’re interbred and fluid – interracial and mixing, you become a more powerful breed by mixing.”

At its heart it seems Total Football is an exploration into a Britain trying to find its feet in a post 7/7 world. “We’ve got to find out who we are and what have we got”¦we’ve sort of latched on to football as this bureaucratic solution to [these questions], inspired by this Olympic attempt to get Team GB together.” Do we even play as Great Britain in the Olympics I ask; it feels like a stupid question but I really don’t know. Apparently so and FIFA aren’t happy about it, their displeasure causing Ireland, Scotland and Wales to withdraw their players from inclusion in order to remain valid entrants for competitions such as the World Cup. Next year, as of going to print, Team GB will be represented by the England under 25s.

Whilst Ridiculusmus do not work to traditional narrative constraints, Woods says that this time the story of this Olympic anomaly and all its philosophical implications has directed their creative process. “We’re usually driven by trying to show a slice of life and try to build an arc of feeling within that slice but this one actually does have quite a story in that it is retelling the events leading to England being the British team”¦”

It seems it is also about a change in attitude to national expectation for ‘our boys’ to win. A number of books on football, including Why England Lose, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, and The Beautiful Game, by David Conn, have had a profound effect on Woods and Haynes during their research. “[Kuper and Szymanski] took apart lots of these questions including this sense that we are underachieving and prove that we in England over achieve based on population and gross domestic product. By making a second round we’ve actually exceeded what we should be achieving”¦.[it’s] a major shift in expectation. This isn’t new knowledge but it is knowledge that we think is worth sharing, it can have a positive change on people”¦a culture of hope and reality and putting it into perspective.”

He tells me a fascinating fact about the success of major sporting events being measured in happiness, and more prosaically in suicide rates, which go down for a year after one takes place. “There’s this happy period where people felt connected”¦I wonder if the Royal Wedding will have the same effect”¦” I also wonder about this and have been wondering about it ever since, about happiness and suicide, collectiveness and identity. Whoever would have thought a show about football could have so much philosophical potential? Ridiculusmus of course.

Total Football is on in the Barbican Pit from 18th May to 18th June 2011. For tickets, visit the Barbican website.


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Honour Bayes

Honour is a freelance writer based in London. As well as contributing to Exeunt she has had articles published on the Guardian arts blog, Total Theatre, Arts Professional, What's On Stage and FEST Magazine. She is Theatre Editor of bi-yearly publication Fourthwall, is worryingly obsessed with Twitter and has her own blog, Theatre Workbook, where she also twitters on regularly.

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