Total Football

Total Football, the latest show by distracted pan-hemispheric geniuses Ridiculusmus (Jon Haynes and David Woods), is a work-in-progress.

I spoke to David one week before opening night (Wed Sep 22), to see if I could observe any of the rehearsals. “Jon doesn’t arrive from London until the day before we open,” David said, “so the first week of shows is going to be our rehearsal.”

And so it was. Opening night started slowly, quietly, purposefully awkwardly in a soccer changing room, where a seminar on ‘What It Means To Be British Today’ is about to commence … except no one turns up. And instead of presenting the seminar, Ridiculusmus plunge the audience into the goldfish bowl of contemporary devised theatre, with its amnesiac ‘live’ness, its awkward pauses and bizarre segues, its are-they-improvising-or-not? moments.

Dispensing with conventional narrative and clearly-defined characters, Total Football is rather a collage of situations, which are interrupted, broken and stripped away like layers of a weird onion.

The best moments in the show come from Jon and David’s strength as performers. David lurches between playing an oafish, sexually predatory office bully and an Argentinian janitor with cognitive impairment and a speech impediment of an accent. Jon, mainly playing himself, is the foil to David’s spit-spraying excesses. Jon looks perpetually perplexed, like a latter-day Buster Keaton who had stumbled unhappily out of a silent film.

As Total Football progresses, the racism of white Britain is touched on in a variety of hilarious and awful ways, and at the centre of the strange onion of British-ness, we are shown a gaping emptiness. But as a show about soccer, it didn’t do it for me. Ridiculusmus skirt around their ostensible topic; rather than representing players or coaches or fans, you get the ‘white collar paper shuffler class’ who administer organisations like FIFA. I wanted the “pathetic attempts at mastering the game” to be literal and physical, not just cerebral. I wanted a bit more bloody soccer. The final scene ties things together, kind of – not explaining what actually happened, or what it might mean, but giving you a great metaphor for thinking about the demented joy of devised theatre, and its constant flirtation with collapse.

Total Football is a show that will build and build. While opening night was far from brilliant, it could well be brilliant by next week. I’m going to see it again just in case, so I’ll keep you posted.

Total Football by Ridiculusmus at La Mama Theatre, Carlton until October 10.

Written and Performed by David Woods and Jon Haynes

Melbourne Fringe Festival, September 22 – October 10