Mike 5

About 16 years ago a mutual friend, John, invited Mike and I to share a stage in a London pub where he, john, was trying out some new material.

Another friend, Toby, who is a genius, took an old filing cabinet that we had bought in a junk shop somewhere in Kilburn and converted it so that both Mike and a basketball could be hidden inside whilst the top drawer would open on its own and allow a file to mysteriously rise, open and release a piece of paper; not to mention the harpoon that would fall from the lighting rig and impale into the stage.

The idea was to attempt to produce a sketch for each letter of the alphabet, with everything coming from or disappearing into the office furniture.

In our biased opinion the show was exceptional; unfortunately this opinion was not shared by the drunken corporate audience that witnessed the final performance.

For a long time the filing cabinet lay alone in the loft of the London flat where I lived and finally it was un-ceremonially dumped at the local refuse centre; I have never been able to tell Toby of its fate as it warranted pride and place in a museum.

During the devising period when we had little idea of what sort of show it would be, Mike and I discovered a common affection for quotations and thus Q would be a sketch in which we would dialogue exclusively in famous quotes, though during rehearsals this grand idea was whittled down to a few sneaky asides in between P and R, all of which was a build up to S for slapstick, in which Mike excelled. more on my obsession with the alphabet here

read more on Mike here.