by ‘I have this misconception that I’m in charge of what’s going on, but there’s all these bananas on stage, and they’re kind of like landmines, waiting,’ says Bill O’Neill, whose show single The Amazing Banana Brothers telling. A poignant attempt by two stuntman brothers to slip on the biggest banana skin. “I’ve gotten pretty good at throwing myself around, but every once in a while, one of these suckers sends me crashing to the ground.”
Each show requires 80 new skins – for the Edinburgh fringes to run for a month this summer, which added a lot of fanfare. And cleaning. Weeks after performing the show at London’s Soho Theatre, the crew found an errant banana lodged in the ceiling.
Most comedy requires just you and a microphone, so why do O’Neill and others decide to make things complicated? “There’s something strange about using props on stage and seeing the scenery fall apart,” says O’Neill. “You feel behind the scenes of the show … you will be a part of everything that happens tonight. It makes people feel more invested. Either that or they think: Jesus Christ, that could use more planning!”
It was a vintage year for messy shows. In Lucy McCormick’s, the stage is so drowned in tomato puree, confetti and wine, the audience helps her clean up. Chaotic characters from Alice Cockayne to Rosalie Minnitt use props and mess to build a small world – a quirky office and an anachronistic period drama, respectively. Minnitt floods the stage with letters and slathers herself in paint. Cockayne anxiously throws out the contents of her handbag and scatters crumbs as she desperately offers us biscuits.
In the first show with sketch duo Grubby Little Mitts (Rosie Nicholls and Sullivan Brown) thousands of ping-pong eyeballs rained down on the audience. “We want our show to straddle the line between theater and comedy,” says Nicholls. “Props play a big role in that.” All their props are red and, appropriately, a little hairy. It took so long to paint the eyes, they begged the audience not to steal any. The actor Brian Cox was present and at the end he revealed his hand, which contained two eyeballs. “He was the only one who was approved,” says Brown.
The trial and error from conception to execution is the hardest part of working with props. “Sullivan came to me and said: ‘I want to flood the stage with piss’,” says Nicholls. Brown described the scene: “We’re dancing, then I start pissing, then you start pissing, and we’re just dancing in the piss.” But was it possible?
Nicholls works in television prop departments, which gives her plenty of experience creating unique objects. They wanted to avoid the theatrical trick of popping plastic bags (too much waste), so they experimented with contraptions. “We had to work out how to get a steady stream,” says Nicholls. They settled on a camel backpack with a sports bottle opener. When they finally tested it with an audience: “It got exactly the reaction we wanted,” says Nicholls. That was a “Victorian-esque shock,” says Brown, “then people were crying and laughing”.
There are risks, says Ella Golt, who combines clowning, physical comedy and circus skills in live shows where she plays characters including the restless magician Ella the Great and Richard Melanin the Third, her drag king persona. “There always has to be a bit of risk,” says Golt. “[That] it keeps him alive.” When something goes wrong – like his magician’s bag exploding at the wrong moment, “there are two options: admit it’s gone wrong or try to cover it up.” A character-specific cover – such as a mime drawing a curtain across the scene, then despairing behind it, before the curtains open and resume – can even heighten the comedy.
Golt often acts without words. “Things tell their own stories,” she says. With a background in fine art sculpture, she makes many of her own props, but also has circus artifacts including a brown suit and an umbrella that doubles as a plate-spinning pole. Used well, “the audience can truly be transported into another universe.”
In O’Neill’s case, the risks were two-fold: getting bananas and bodily injury. Beth Reardon, part of the Soho theater team that brought the show to the outskirts of Edinburgh, had an unusual brief: find 2,000 bananas, peel them, and dispose of the waste sustainably. “He was affectionately known as ‘banadmin,'” says Reardon. “We got to a point where we were worried about size.” She contacted Edinburgh Zoo, but they were unable to take them. Eventually, she found local businesses making smoothies and bananas a deep friend.
On stage, O’Neill had to pull off a perfect stunt while dealing with the accumulated slippery mess. “I was getting pretty cooked,” he says. “There were shows where my shoulder would pop out and I was flailing around trying to pop it back in. Another thing that keeps it exciting.”
O’Neill credits his director, fellow American Natalie Palamides, famous for her own messy shows Laid and Nate, for helping him “find meaning in chaos”. Their efforts earned them a nomination for an Edinburgh Comedy award. O’Neill says: “If there is a world where I don’t have to throw bananas at the audience and throw myself on the floor for people to enjoy, I don’t want to live there.”
