Horseplay talk about heaven and wigs

Can you imagine living in a blissful afterlife where sex and performance are strictly prohibited? Horseplay discover exactly what that's like in their comedy show [l]Bareback[l/].

Turns out, there's musical numbers, quick changes and an extortionate amount of wigs when you cross over. As well as this, you can expect to meet a whole host of interesting characters such as an artisanal dildo maker, a talking vagina which a penchant for beat poetry and Timothee Chamalet. We spoke to the creators of Bareback, Kathy Maniura and Derek Mitchell, about writing a show over Zoom, heaven, talking genitals and of course, wigs.

If you got to heaven and didn't like it, what would you do about it?

What a wonderful question! As it turns out, this is basically what our show Bareback is about. So, we've certainly spent a lot of time considering this question and playing out the different potentialities in our heads (and live onstage for a paying audience)!

Ultimately, we've settled on this: find the talking anus and vagina as quickly as possible and join them in a lip-sync battle to upset the afterlife's delicate balance. Also, beware of the microphone-brandishing celebrity sex therapist.

If we were to end up in heaven tomorrow, though, and it turned out the afterlife was nothing like we'd anticipated, we'd probably just find the section with a cocktail bar blasting nothing but noughties pop classics? There would definitely be no hangovers in heaven, right?

If one of the rules of Fringe was having to stay in character ALL THE TIME, who would you be?

We'd probably pose as two critics from a very important publication (like British Comedy Guide!) so that we could get into as many shows as possible for free. Of course, we'd need to actually write the reviews in order to keep up appearances. So we'd probably also have to create websites that bear a passing resemblance to real, official ones, where we could publish our reviews for all the artists anxiously awaiting them. GURDIAN.COM. BROADWAYBOOBY.ORG. THESCOOTSMAN.GOV. We're not sure how long we'd be able to keep up the charade, but we'd certainly give everyone five stars!

You had to write the show while locked down in different countries. How did that change the way you work?

I think we became very good at reading one another's faces over Zoom for approval and disdain. Kidding (kind of). Hot take alert: the pandemic really messed things up for a while there! So we found the ritual of writing everyday massively grounding, through all the chaos and uncertainty. We ended up rewriting the show about a million times, so a lot of what we wrote was, in a strict sense, terrible. But I think the stripped-down nature of the process, and the fact there were no deadlines and no certainty we'd ever even be able to perform the show meant we approached the writing process with a granular attention to detail.

In the future, we'll probably do things differently when writing shows (e.g. be in the same room, hopefully not be plagued by constant existential dread). But the whole experience made Bareback much, much better (if we do say so ourselves), and it made us (hopefully) better writers more confident in our own material.

How many wigs are too many wigs?

Really hoping this is the riddle that's asked when gaining entry into the afterlife. It's obviously a trick question, as there is no such thing as too many wigs. Derek's just put in an order for 6 new ones this morning.

In our flat (we live together in East London, come over for dinner sometime we'd love to have you!) we have an entire wardrobe in the living room filled with costume and, especially wigs. We're very lucky to be living in a time when it's easy and affordable to get very high quality wigs, both online and in shops (buy local, friends!). But it is sometimes a challenge to find wigs that are especially... characterful.

Most people by wigs in order to look absolutely stunning - and this is mostly what the wig market is geared towards. We, on the other hand, are always on the lookout for wigs that make us look insane and tell a very, very specific story about the character.

What's your idea of a heavenly time outside of your show?

We like to travel to out-of-the-way historical sites that require multiple train transfers. Derek once became obsessed with a country estate located in the north of Wales, after seeing it featured on a reality show about cleaning old houses. We journeyed there for his birthday, and even got to meet the owner, a chic and iconic woman who has singlehandedly saved the place from total ruin. We also stayed in a little Airbnb in the attic of a barn in the nearby village, put on some wigs and drank lots of whiskey until very late into the night. Which is definitely our other primary version of an utterly heavenly time.