Updated: Sep 4, 2019
Ridiculusmsus are a multi-award winning theatre company who have been making 'seriously funny' shows for twenty five years. I saw their last one, Give Me Your Love, when they toured to my University late last year. It was a stark and excellently devised performance about PTSD sufferers being treated with MDMA and from now on I will seek them out whenever they perform. Which is quite soon as it happens, after a run at Battersea Arts Centre, they are bringing their new show to Edinburgh. Die! Die! Die! Old People Die!, a dark comedy about ageing and dying that has already garnered impressive reviews, and the company were kind enough to answer some questions for us before they begin their run.
1. What’s special about the Edinburgh Fringe Festival? The intense atmosphere of unfettered art.
2. If you could go back to your first ever Fringe would you do anything different? No, sleeping in that broom cupboard made me
3. What was the best advice you got as an emerging company/performer/comedian? The arts make living worthwhile – remember that, go to the dentist, brush your teeth with an electric toothbrush and floss. Always meet and greet the presenter, don’t work with dick heads and shit heads. Beware of charming sociopathic monsters presenting themselves as artists, call out racists, phobes, bullies and bastards.
4. What’s the worst gig you’ve ever done? We entered a talent competition at Worthing Pavillion in 1992 and were booed on then after a few painful minutes we slow hand clapped off to the delight of the audience. There was no stage door and we had to make an exit of shame through the crowd. Many of them congratulated us with gushes of loving praise. I had to be talked out of going back with a machine gun like the Joker in Batman.
5. If you weren’t in this business, what job would you be doing? Pigeon fancier
6. What’s your best memory of the fringe? An evening in 2013 in the summerhall bar on the old leather couch. I hope it’s still there and that the same persons will be there and we shall meander forth across a starlit meadow and down shiny cobbled streets to a dawn in the north.
7. Any special food recommendations up in Edinburgh? Baked tattie shop Cockburn street with Vegetarian haggis filling before it sells out. Hendersons salad bar and the mosque.
8. Is there anyone performing this year you’re desperate to see? Yes, Patrizia Paolini (The Eradication Of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland- also at Summerhall). I find straight acting rather boring, comedians predictable and performers generally predictable. Patrizia is bent, wild, funny and terrifying and I CAN NOT WAIT to be in her amazing presence again.
9. How did this current show come about? DSM V 2016’s proposal to define Grief as a mental illness
10. Why should someone come see your show? Because we are all going to die and will want to make our peace with our baggage before the moment comes. There’s a lot of boring serious stuff out there and a lot of shallow exciting stuff. We offer a wholesome combo of the both - boring and shallow... I jest... We offer seriously funny stuff borne of a 27 year artistic partnership between Buster Keaton’s role model and a bald beautiful lump of athletic rubberyness. Stuff that will pierce through the fog of hops and heat and stay in your nightmares and giggle bag well beyond the binge.
Photo by Bryony Jackson
Die! Die! Die! Old People Die! runs at Summerhall - TechCube 0 from August 13th - 25th (not 19th)
Tickets available here -
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/die-die-die-old-people-die