Bourgeois & Maurice are one of the best comedy double acts in the UK. Their brand of surreal, campy humour is refreshingly unique. According to their website, “Bourgeois & Maurice are alien siblings from another planet that you’ve probably never heard of because it’s very new and cool and obscure.” Since they arrived from said planet in 2007, they’ve built up a loyal following. We caught up with them to discuss their latest album, life in lockdown and their post-pandemic plans.
1. First of all, how have you been coping with lockdown?
This lockdown has felt much harder than the last, it seems like everyone’s had the same desire to just hibernate and wait it out. Thankfully with the announcement of the lockdown easing, and the end of the arctic tundra, there does seem to be a sense of hope at the end of the tunnel. We’ve spent the last 8 months busy working on the album which was nice to focus on but we just checked our bank balance and that’s less nice, so we’re really glad to see Boris has some kind of plan. Pretty much our entire income comes from live performance, it was really terrifying to see how easily that can disappear.
2. Insane Animals opened in Manchester last year. The musical begins with a camp reimagining of Gilgamesh. Do you think the Epic of Gilgamesh should be read as a queer story?
We think everything should be read as a queer story really, but in this specific case we definitely do. The gods create a companion for Gilgamesh and tell him to “love him, cherish him and comfort him like a wife”. That’s Tom Cruise and David Miscavitch levels of BFF, if you ask us. The Mesopotamians were pretty queer in general, they were cool about sex work and there were loads of non binary gods. It feels like it’s just taken 4,000 years for the world to catch up with them.
3. As the musical was forced to close you made an album instead. How does the Insane Animals album differ from the stage show?
The original run in Manchester was 3 weeks long and we were really lucky that we made it to closing night. The venue shut 48 hours later. But yes we were on the brink of making some exciting plans for the show and those all vanished the instant covid hit. Making the album has been a chance to go back and focus on the music and really try to bring the show to life in album form, which has been so good to do.
We were writing the show for 3 years before it premiered but even with that amount of prep, there was still a huge amount of rewriting to do once it got to rehearsal and that was hard, given that we were also performing at the same time. Making the album meant we were able to revisit all the material and sharpen it and build up the production with our brilliant MD Victoria Falconer. We kept some dialogue on the album too so people could hopefully follow the story without giving too much away – there are a few surprises in the live show which need to be experienced IRL!
4. Do you think your dystopian vision may have been slightly too accurate?
I don’t think even our horrid little minds could have come up with what the last year had in store for the world! In fact, whilst ‘Insane Animals’ is about humanity on the brink of extinction (sorry, it was funny when we wrote it THREE YEARS AGO), the end is uncharacteristically hopeful. We propose that humanity has the ability to think its way out of any big problem. The only difficulty is – it has to work together. Fingers crossed we find a way to do that, cos you know, it’s nice being alive and living on a planet that has a perfectly evolved ecosystem.
5. Do you have plans to take the show on tour after lockdown?
We have no firm plans… yet! We always wanted this show to tour but with Covid hitting all of that was put on hold. Hopefully we can start having conversations with venues again soon, although it’s going to take a while before the theatre industry is anywhere close to being what it was. We wanted to make the album as a way of not only capturing the show that we made and giving people a creative output in its own right, but we also want to get people hooked on the hooks, so they’re desperate to see it back on stage! It’s such an uplifting, and fun show, but also one that asks very pertinent questions about life, power and the strength of humanity, so it feels very OTM. Plus it’s camp as bloody Christmas, and we all need some glitz and sparkle after this year don’t we?!
6. What memories spring to mind when you think of Brighton? You’ve performed here many times.
Yes we love Brighton! Performing at the Spiegeltent is always a highlight but we’ll never forget our first performance which was in a tiny gay bar, with 3 people in the audience, 2 of whom were our friends. And they left mid-way through because one of them needed to puke. Ah, misty watercoloured memories.
Insane Animals is available on all music streaming platforms from Monday 1 March, 2021.
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