Max and Ivan on Edinburgh Fringe show Our Story

Empty chairs are a rare thing at a Max and Ivan show, and this has been the case since their Fringe debut way back in 2010. If music be the food of love, their eponymous debut saw the duo singing, rapping and darting around displaying their trademark surreal take on relationships. But, as they insist down the line from sunny London, that first show of largely unconnected sketches: "Never happened".

The show that never happened garnered five-star reviews and sold out runs from its very early days, but its legacy was to pave the way for the comedy duo to get their teeth into something bigger. “Each sketch is its own self-contained world,” says Max, “you go in and you go out, and there are lots of extensions to that form and people make their shows wonderfully, but we had a kind of niggling sense that we could get more out of a show in which we were telling a story.

"So the characters don’t come and go in one flock; you get to know them, you invest in them a little bit and you get to weave something together.”

And weave they did: Max and Ivan are Holmes and Watson in 2011 saw the two taking two of the UK’s best-loved characters and spinning them into life.

“Something definitely clicked when we tried that out,” Ivan says, on their first long-form comedic offering. “It felt right,” Max agrees. “It felt like the show we wanted to make. It felt like you could pour so much more into it, you could tell so much more of a satisfying story over the course of an hour than you could within 30 different two-minute chunks [in a sketch show]. It was well received, which was lovely, but we really enjoyed the process of firstly creating it and then, more importantly, performing it.”

While performing it, the pair use facial contortions over costume, and mime over props, allowing them both to dazzle as performers. It turns out this was a practical choice as well as an artistic one: “That sketch show, if I remember rightly, we had so many props and costumes, we actually had two mates backstage to help us dress.” says Ivan.

Max adds: “We had two full rails of costume, if not three, and basically it was wildly expensive, it was completely insane, and I’m pretty sure none of the costumes added anything. That was one of the other big choices: we thought we want to tell a story, and also we’re just going to do it without any props or costumes, and it’s just going to be us, a couple of chairs, and a dream.”

Ivan continues, “Actually, Holmes and Watson had just one chair. It was super lo-fi, we sold out the next year and got two chairs.”

What’s the furniture situation looking like for this year? “We got a bloody park bench last year, who knows,” Max wonders, before Ivan says: “We might have a sedan.” 

A history of Max and Ivan

Since Holmes and Watson they have tried their hand at being Con Artists, a class full of school chums at The Reunion, and an entire doomed town in The End. They have also both given ridiculously athletic performances as pro-comedy-wrestlers at Fringe bi-annual barnstormer The Wrestling: a highly physical, comedic free-for-all which has to be seen to be believed.

This Fringe will not see The Wrestling take to that stage, however. “It is indeed a fallow year. It’s essentially impossible to do it two years in a row.” Max tell us.

“It takes a couple of years to recover.” Ivan says, understandably.

“It is very much a deep excavation of the soul to vomit the whole thing into existence,” Max says of their joint creation, “We do it with the practical and production help of the Pleasance who very kindly make the Pleasance Grand look stunning. We’ve done everything from building the show, directing the show, working with all the acts and getting them in the ring and training them in the dark art of being a professional wrestler. Which I do with my long-time wrestling collaborator Dan the Hammerhead who is well-versed in slamming comedians.”

Ivan is nodding all the while. “Max always works in double-acts.”

The partnerships we see in Max and Ivan’s shows are many and varied: from professional double-acts (tour guides, get-away drivers) to romantic partnerships (long-lost, clandestine or married and in need of the end of the world to relight their fire) and everything in between (an elderly man and his carer, a pair of pen-pals reunited as enemies, or the hapless Billy and his own inner monologue while on a date with a member of the audience). These vignettes of smaller relationships build up into a complex whole.

In more recent shows in particular, the comedy and breathless character acrobatics have been centred around a powerful emotional core. The Reunion saw unrequited love battle chronic illness, and The End brought a prodigal son back home to watch the end of the world with his emotionally distant father. Are they mixing comedy and tragedy on purpose?

The mood of each piece comes more from the story they are trying to tell than from any conscious move, as Max explains: “Stories tend to have some kind of heart – something central pulling at it. I don’t think that was a conscious decision to go in a darker direction, but each show takes on a different flavour, be it silly or romantic or dark.

"In The End we enjoyed exploring a kind of run-down dilapidated town that was part the towns that we grew up in and part every town anyone’s ever been to, and then coupling that with a kind of mini-apocalypse gives that a slightly dark tone, which bled into the characters and the heart of it.”

On the "one hundred percent true" Our Story

The towns Max and Ivan grew up in will be making their way into the spotlight at this year’s Fringe in Our Story. After five years of pretending to be other people, Max and Ivan are finally telling us about themselves. But how much of the extraordinary true story is true?

“One hundred percent,” promises Max.

“Absolutely,” agrees Ivan.

“It just happens that we’ve lived very, very, very funny lives.”

“Weirdly, we were discussing how we met and all of that – and the audiences of Edinburgh will find out exactly how it happened,” Ivan continues, “we were also talking about our parents, and they’ve got ridiculous life stories as well. It got to the point where it got too bizarre.”

“People would think we were bad at comedy writing if we put our parents’ lives in the show. But everything you see is based on a true story,” Max insists.

Whatever kind of furniture that story is accompanied by, Max and Ivan are excited to tell it on stage, all their complex story-weaving coming to life.

“It’s up and running and growing and breathing and taking shape,” Max says. “It’s our best show yet.”

Ivan adds: “Best – show – ever!”

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Max & Ivan: Our Story, Pleasance Dome: Queen Dome, 3-28 Aug (not 15), 8.20pm, £6-12.50