Umbilical Brothers

Is this new season of Heaven by Storm a rejigged version, or is it the same as the one from ten years ago? It's been rejigged and hopefully re-energised because it's our most physical show. And that's why we're doing it: we want to do it again before we're unable to do it. This show involves space travel and sky diving, and when you're skydiving off roller chairs it gets physically demanding. The last time we did it in Sydney was '98 at the Opera House amazingly enough, which is the perfect venue for that show because we can use the dock doors in the show as an entrance to heaven. We like exploiting the space available to us.

Is this also a goodbye to this show? I don't think so. We want to video it. We want to put it on a DVD and work out what's the best place to shoot it. Again, the Playhouse is such a lovely theatre. For comedy generally, but specially for this show, you get to see all the detail. We want to put it down on video before it becomes too difficult for us. Not that we're old or anything.

Well, yeah: you're not exactly elderly and arthritic... No! I think doing this keeps us young. There's a very childlike mindset involved in it. We structure it in a complex way and present it with it's own self-referential quality, but really there's a childish mindset operating. I think that keeps you physically young as much as anything.

So if any readers are thinking to themselves, "I'm going to need a kidney soon,'" an Umbilical Brother would be a decent target? Yeah! Obviously, and I would specify Dave [Collins, the other 'Brother]. Purely for non-selfish reasons; he just happens to be a few years younger than me. So yes, if you're out there and you're some kind of freak with a large hunting knife, wait until after the last show and then go to town on Dave.

Your shows are obviously heavily rehearsed, but they still have that improvised, skin-of-the-teeth feel. That's really important to us. It's very carefully structured and all the jokes have been written, but they have been written through improvising the show up to where it is. Most of our shows start at an hour or so and once we've worked them up to what they are, they're an hour and a half just through mucking around. If we keep that energy, you can't tell where the joins are or where the improv is and the pre-rehearsed stuff is. It always has to look like the first time. We think of it what we do as slapstick stand-up. Sometimes people call what we do mime but we only had a week of mime in acting school. We're just holding invisible objects.

A lot of people talk about the craft of your performance, but never about the amount of R&D that you've done in terms of creating invisible objects. Oh! Tell me about it! We get all of our stuff shipped over from Oslo, Norway. It's a company called InvisiCorp.

I hear they do good work. I've never seen said work myself, obviously, by definition... That's right, they're very hard to track down, but we managed to some time ago and they're in the credits of our Speedmouse DVD: "Invisible Javelin provided by InvisiCorp."

Oslo. It's a city of mystery. It is. We were there only two months ago. We performed a show there and they really got into it.

Well, you know, they're probably very proud to see their products on stage. Yeah: "look at the craftsmanship of that!"

Heaven by Storm runs at the Opera House 18-30 Aug.

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