On stage, UK sketch team Max Olesker and Ivan Gonzalez morph into a whole host of different personalities. Rather than a succession of disconnected gags, their shows are rooted in a central narrative and character development. After grabbing mounds of praise for last year’s MICF offering The Reunion, Max & Ivan return this year with The End. Writing, directing and starring in a new work of multi-faceted theatre every 12 months is no walk in the park, but the duo were determined to come back to Melbourne with something fresh.
“We’ve always used big milestones in the calendar to force us to stay active,” Olesker says. “Because our shows are self-contained, very theatrical narrative stories with lots of different characters, we have to sit down with the terrifying horror of a blank page and go ‘Alright, what’s the story that we’re going to tell?’ The Reunion was a real joy to perform, but we try not to linger too long on the same thing.”
The End takes place in fictional UK town Sudley-On-Sea – a dreary old place for which Max & Ivan had no shortage of inspiration. “It’s a fictional town that’s an amalgamation of all of the places we remember from growing up,” says Olesker. “It is a loving tribute, but to places which can be quite frequently slightly bleak, run down and dilapidated. Weirdly when we’ve performed it, we’ve had lots of people come up to us and go ‘It’s clearly based on my home town.’”
Life in Sudley-On-Sea is typically slow-paced and uneventful. That is, until reports arrive about the earth’s impending demise. It’s a startling news bulletin no doubt, but given that Sudley’s a fairly lifeless place already, is this really such a tragedy?
“You see the town as it is prior to the event, and you see the pace of life for what it is, and then it all kicks off,” Olesker explains. “I suppose the question is whether that’s a bad thing, or whether Sudley was already somewhat of a calamity beforehand.”
Max & Ivan tend to work with a grotesque palette, which allows them to squeeze humour out of every available crevice. However, this shouldn’t discount the effort applied to building characters the audience can feel sympathy towards.
“[The End] is a tale of a group of people in very challenging circumstances,” Olesker says. “There’s an entire town that hopefully you grow to care about. Those people being placed under pressure is the crux of the story.
“We wanted to ensure that it was a very human and a very personal apocalypse,” he adds, “and not some sort of zany sci-fi tale of aliens coming or anything like that.”
An interesting facet of Max & Ivan’s shows is that all characters, be they male or female, are performed by the two titular constituents. Additionally, there’s no fooling around with make-up or props. This generates a haphazard edge, which breeds plenty of unpredictable humour.
“We’ve always been fascinated by how willing an audience is to go along with what is essentially just two men sweating at them on a stage which is more or less empty,” Olesker says. “We set ourselves the task of conjuring up entire worlds and communities and situations and stories, using very little. It’s nice to try to create a real emotional pull and to suck people into a story and it’s also nice to flip it around and highlight the rough around the edges nature of the fact that we are clearly just two men using their voices and bodies and the magic of theatre.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
