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Paul Hunter talks to performer, director and writer Jos Houben about the early days of Complicité, his upcoming book and his approach to physical comedy.
Told by an Idiot's Artistic Director Paul Hunter in free-flowing conversation with friends and colleagues from the theatre industry, delving into what made them the people they are today.
Paul: Hello and welcome to Regrets,
I've Had A Few. I'm Paul Hunter,
Artistic Director of Told by an Idiot,
and this is a podcast where I talk to
friends and colleagues delving into what
made them the person they are today.
Hello.
My guest this month joins me from Paris,
and he is an actor, director, writer.
And when I speak about him,
I often hear myself saying what this man
doesn't know about physical
comedy is not worth knowing.
And I've been very lucky to work with him
very recently on our show, Charlie
and Stan, which is an absolute delight.
Welcome, Jos Houben.
Jos: Thank you.
Thank you for that wonderful introduction.
Go on. Carry on!
Paul: I have to ask.
I might have asked this in the last month
or so when we were together,
Chaplin and Laurel, of course,
the subject of our show where either of
those figures you encountered as a child.
Jos: As a child, the first figures I
encountered, I mean, I'm from that era.
I'm talking - I was a small kid in the sixties
where I did not see these
things on television.
We were wheeled into a little parochial
centre, with screen or in the school hall.
And we were shown movies and the first
ones that I was shown -
of that were Laurel and Hardy.
And then later on, a bit later,
I discovered Buster Keaton.
And that was a real,
you know, I remember laughing a lot
with the scene where they're both
on a building site and
Stan Laurel has a crab in his pants.
That, for me, isn't unforgettable and
undeletable part of my
childhood cinema memories.
That and but then, of course, I saw
almost by chance when I was,
much later, twelve or something.
I saw the general by Buster Keaton,
and that stirred me that really
did something to me.
I was already a very big fan of strip
cartoons, you know, and Bon de ciné,
like they say, Belgium, and
of anything that was humorous in drawing
much more than I've never been attracted.
Really by - although I use it, we use
it all the time wit and verbal humour.
But
if I was impressed or if I enjoyed verbal
humour, it was usually by characters
that were very clownish.
I'm not clever what I
mean knowing, but more
so - yes.
Then at the same time as this
happened very curiously,
I took up some dance classes when I was 14
or 15 because I felt this need
to move and these rhythms.
And I was never going to be
a dancer but I loved dancing.
So this is in my system, if you want,
something to do with physicality, timing,
celebrating something,
communicating something through that yes.
Paul: And it's interesting going right back
to that period. So you
say you took up dancing? Did you have
any kind of theatre in your background?
Jos: None.
None,
there was none none - nothing.
There was no theatre for miles
around where I grew up.
And then there was some sort of cultural
centre that was built
again when I was a teenager
and for theatre you had to go through
well, you had to drive, I don't know,
you had to drive an hour to a city.
I was taking once to a play that did not
interest me. Again,
when I was 17 or 18,
I saw in that cultural centre,
just a small place next to where I grew
up, this is a real deep mining area,
countryside, the east of Belgium,
near the German border.
I saw a physical theatre performance
by two guys that came from Le Coq,
Jay Gery and Luca Smith.
And that was it.
And then, as it happened,
one of them was teaching workshops
at University when I went to Uni.
And so it was just it was just three
little connection points this could have
not - this could have totally
passed me by, you know,
and I would be whatever I would
be now and an Air Force pilot.
or a journalist
No, I'm a physical performer.
Paul: But it's interesting that kind of so often
I talk to colleagues and how random those
connections are, you know,
I went to to College, and I was
very reluctant to go where I went.
But that's where I met
Hayley and John Wright.
And that's why I'm doing what I am doing.
But I didn't want to be there initially.
Jos: Because that that of course - once I was,
like I said this, this has seized me.
I was aroused and disturbed by this.
So I was good at everything.
I was at University.
I was studying languages and philosophy,
but I could not possibly stay any longer.
And
so I quit.
And I said to my parents,
Im going to Paris and bless them forever
they say, Well, if thats what makes you
happy, you know and thats what they did.
Paul: Thats brilliant.
Jos: And I felt guilty.
And I should have finished University.
And then later I
discovered that Gertrude Stein
also said that she found
University a bit boring.
So I was in good company.
Paul: Now I'm gonna ask this question because
the title of this podcast is Regrets,
I've Had A Few and I never think of you as
someone who would have any regrets.
But I'm going to ask you the fact that you
didn't finish University,
you've never regretted that at all?
Jos: No, I have.
Hang on.
It's a double edged sword because yes,
of course, in the sense that my hunger
and my desire to learn and to nourish
myself intellectually
stayed with me forever.
You should see the type of books I buy.
I keep on buying and half-read and
the stuff that I inform myself
with and I have actually ended up
connecting with like a philosopher - I'm
writing a book with right now because.
But I regret it.
I continued somehow this reading process and
this absorbing of knowledge. But yes,
I regretted that somehow this
went not a bit further deeper.
But I didn't not regret
having left University and that I - I
never looked back really.
Not really.
No.
I could have maybe done with a more
concentrated four years you know.
But then there you go,
that's just the way the cookie crumbles you know.
Paul: That's True -just jumping
Jos: Or all people all the people I would not
have met, you know, like Simon McBurney.
I would have missed them.
So they you are.
No, it's true.
The time, the time that you're
there is the right time to be there.
Jos: Absolutely yeah.
Paul: Now, jumping around. You mentioned a book
you're writing
with a
philosopher can you tell us a bit about that?
Jos: This all sounds very pompous,
and important, but it isnt
and that it is not meant to be.
I have a desire to write in the sense
that I like to formulate words
and thoughts and sentences
and commit them to paper.
Although I left - but I left my language
area when I was 19, when I was 20 or 21.
I'm not an eloquent.
I'm eloquent enough speaker
and all that in French and English.
But I'm not a good writer
in those languages.
I never tried.
I was especially in French.
Its very forbidding, when I also when I do
radio interviews the way the French talk
and the way they construct thoughts
through sentences are very intimidating.
And I never.
But I felt OK, I'm going
to do this with someone.
And I proposed friends that I write
but these are such solitary figures.
But then I started about
ten years ago I met
15 years ago.
I met a friend of mine, came to see
one of the first out of laughters.
And he gave me a few.
He said, yes, he said,
Indeed, he's a philosopher.
He was then doing his PhD in philosophy.
But he's a lighting designer in Theatre.
So that's how I knew him.
And he said, yes, indeed.
And he said a few sentences and I
scribbled them down and they become part
of the opening speech
of the Art of Laughter.
We stayed in touch.
He is now the one that I always worked
with when I direct and create
music, hit or opera.
And then I said, I want
to do something with you.
And he was very open to that.
He's somebody who likes dialogue.
And then when lockdown happened,
my first reaction is,
I must absolutely do something so that
later I can say I took advantage of that.
I shall not be crushed
by this or be a victim.
So I called him and we decided to
dialogue for about an hour or two each
week you would write all that down.
And then little by little he would start
to write things out and a text was formed.
And we ended up with 350
pages of Jos, this, stop, jos, this, stop.
And I said, OK, if we're going to make
this into a book, into a text, it has to
be, I want to honour my Belgian roots.
It has to be a piece of surrealism or dada
artist this if I'm gonna talk about later
philosophy, this cannot
makes sense on just one level.
Its need to - we
need to fall through the lines and end up
on the wrong page and turn the book around
so that implicitly implicitly
through paradox and misunderstanding,
this book invites the reader to also think
with us around these things rather than
saying in a very Cartesian
way. Here is this proposition.
And here's what we think about it.
And this,
we named this book Bergson's Dog after
Bergson, who wrote the famous essay
on Laughter, I think
apart from a few
like Baudelaire and Aristotle,
the only philosopher who really actually
paid any attention to that phenomenon.
And he wrote an essay, a brief
text called On Laughter.
And we invented a dog,
that this philosopher had a dog.
And we call this Bergson's dog,
Le chien de Bergson,
and Bergson's dog is always behaving in
such a way that invalidates his theories.
And because the dog is funny.
So anyway, so this had something to do
with the man who thinks and the living
thing that moves in a playful way.
And there it is.
It's going to be
it's going to be published
on the 3rd of February next year.
And yeah
absolutely.
Paul: That sounds wonderful
And a friend of mine as
a comic performer, a Belgian lady.
She's very good -she's
very good at drawing.
And she drew a little dog and
that ended up on the front of the book.
And the dog runs through the text
and takes away a word causes mayhem.
Paul: Jos - that sounds brilliant
I had good fun doing that so there it is
I look forward to that.
Now you mentioned Le Coq.
So you found out about Le Coq,
from that performance that you
saw with the two guys.
Jos: Yes yes.
Paul: And then do you remember? Because I can
vividly remember the first time I
encountered Hayley. Can you remember
the first time you encountered
Simon and Marcello?
Jos: Yes.
I remember Simon.
Marcello -I bumped in to him.
He came out of the school because they had
class in the morning than we
had class in the afternoon.
And because I'd like to show off
my Italian, we chat a little bit.
And I remember he gave me some advice.
He gave me some advice
and I have a very clear image
of that - just exactly what that is.
And Simon - and Simon ended up- this was
sort of halfway through,
I've already seen him perform because
the second year presents
stuff the first year doesn't.
And then he ended up
renting or hanging out in an apartment
that we rented with six or seven,
a whole bunch of first year students.
He ended up living there.
And so we shared we
became friends because we still
in the same place, not because
we were in the same school.
And then he came.
Then you know, we - handed
flash bag was around there.
So he was doing mass school.
We ended up drinking cheap wine
in the evenings and becoming very close.
And
when he left and started to play, I
was not so close to Marcello then at all.
But to Simon, yes.
And then when he left for England
and started Complicite,
Annabel Arden and Fiona Gordon,
he said to me, when you're done with the
second year come to London, and I did.
And that was it.
That was it
that is the real.
There's three things
about the Le Coq school.
One is, of course, the man himself
and the teaching that now continues.
Second is the place,
the very building, the very space
in which you are - invites something.
It is such an amazingly,
aspiring place for movement
and such a secret.
It's such a charming
in a historical place.
So the space is a very big space.
And so you learn to love taking the space.
Yeah
And I teach them now.
And each Monday morning when I
walk in, there is very quiet.
I just stand in the middle of the I got
come believe this is still unchanged since
I was here in 1981, you know,
they put a few licks of paint
and change some windows.
That's basically the same place as it was
in the turn of the century when it was a
place with a movement place
for military officers.
And
the third, really the word of the third
root of learning in Le Coq is
the meeting with other people.
And you're always collaborating.
You're always collaborating.
You're always collaborating.
You're never on your own,
never on your own.
You do it with seven, with eleven,
with three, sometimes even with the whole
class 30 and you just come
and the Le Coq's philosophy was
the other one brings you out.
You cannot bring yourself out of yourself.
The other one provokes you that makes you
exist, you know, and the other ones don't
want to work with you,
try and work with them, you know.
And that was a very, very, very powerful,
very potent three elements of that -
it's a context it's an environment.
It's a way of being.
It's a way of
connecting,
provoking each other searching, failing,
searching and not at all a linear teaching
of here is a teacher and this is what this
is, the knowledge I now
transport over to your brain.
Paul: And it's very interesting when you talk
about those three things, in a sense,
brings me to my next well not question,
but kind of memory really,
was the three of you,
you Marcello and Simon,
in A Minute Too Late is
a very early Complicite memory for me.
Was that, did that, making that show,
did that feel like a natural extension
from the school or was it different?
Jos: Absolutely, the
show, the theme, was based on,
theme came, was proposed by Simon.
He
had a few years or a year even before he
came to Le coq, he had lost his father
and he wanted to make loss a theme
of a very funny show,
which is an interesting proposition.
And then
although they were a year above me,
we had such, not collaborated
creating material together.
Simon and Marcello had,
they were some sort of turbo street clown
duo and they had already made a show
with Fiona Gordon,
and they had already established a certain
language and, but with Simon, of course,
I had already had lots of
sparring sessions and ideas and ways
of thinking about what how do you provoke
a space with simple object remembers had
some bricks on stage and we found and I
brought into that
stuff I had seen in Holland and in Belgium
at that moment that was, as I said,
quite dadistic like the Mexican.
... And that did
not exist in Britain.
And I brought this kind of this desire
to sort of not just deconstruct
but sort of stanley knife the rules
of Theatre a bit
and recompose a little bit and find
more immediate ways to get there.
So this Flemish avant-gard that was
already born by then had not reached,
gotten across the channel.
But I have - I was very, h
ow shall I say, influenced by that.
So as we started making things,
we were quite - we just did them.
There was very few questioning, actually,
there were no question marks,
really in that creative process.
There was nothing but dot, dot,
dots and exclamation marks.
What if we did this or that might work
that's what we are definitely going to do
what we're going to do now
we're going to do this.
Now we're going to do
that with the exterior invaluable,
of course, exterior eye and directing
notes from Annabel Arden -
we made that show in a
first mould, and then that thing just kept
on being reworked and reworked
and rebuilt all through the first tours.
So there were constantly a process.
Paul: But I remember also
slightly after that when
Hayley and I were studying and John
said to us, we had to go
to see -I didn't, I had never had never
heard of
Complicite, neither had Hayley, and a
group of us were sent by John
to the Shaw Theatre to see an evening
with theatre de Complicite,
and it kind of blew us away.
We hadn't really seen anything like that.
This would be 1986 or something.
And then when the retrospective happened
with Pierre Audi at the Almeida, we
kind of hung out there because there was
something about you lot
that didn't look like actors.
You look like some crazy circus rather
than the actors that we'd seen before
again.
I'm sure that wasn't deliberate.
It's just who you were,
but it felt very different.
Certainly felt very different at the time
Jos: And that, we were,
I had no, I'm sure Simon did,
but Marcello and I had no connection with,
no idea what the British theatre scene
was like or was supposed to be like.
So we were just - yes, we were just
these immigrant
artists that made stuff and were very
charmed and interested to meet all
these other people that came to us.
And
looked so surprised and happy that we
were doing what we were doing we were
quite naive in that sense
Paul: Well, we were very pleased and excited
that you were doing your stuff.
And the other thing,
I suppose that for me,
was obviously Complicite were a big
influence on Told by an Idiot.
But I remember in
1981? no 1991
in a field in Holland meeting,
Hamish and John, when they
were doing Flight to Finland,
Yes and that really, really clicked for me
and obviously they,
presumably you met them through
Complicite. How did you meet
Hamish and John?
Jos: They did - we did workshops and we met
him and John doing workshops in Oxford.
We will spend a lot of time or the first
two or three shows were made literally
in situ at Oxford, at the Pegasus Theatre in Oxford.
And we did workshops.
And I'd met John and Hamish
and Michelin was part of Complicite.
My then partner met them too
where they befriended each other.
And they wanted to make a show.
And by that time,
the strangest thing happened.
I went to to do Theatre,
more interested in a Theatre of movement
in the sense of contemporary dance.
Then, as such, thinking,
I'm going to do funny stuff.
But I was interested in it because it it
meant something to me.
There was something about the
the engineering, the city art of it
much more than the
fact that Haha, we love it.
And then this guy said, oh,
could you direct us in a show?
And I say and I said,
Well, what is it about?
He said, oh, we don't mind.
We don't care.
As long as it's funny.
It has to be funny from
the beginning to the end.
And that really, really are
literally that they had no scene.
And I said, okay,
but it's put it somewhere, you know, it's
in a it happens in a park or on a boat.
And we just made bits of material and sort
of collage them together,
like about, clean
painting.
You like, very naively little bits.
And then we found the through line.
And that was then a new revelation for me
that after complicite and it's in a
way already logically complicite through
Simon and Also Annabel and Marcello's
direction, we went to look for a
Theatre and text and societal themes.
I ended up in this world
that was much more again.
It was much more surreal, dadaistic,
a sort of, I
would not say analogy
but a suspicion of meaning presented
as such, which brought me later.
It brought me later,
also to contemporary music.
Paul: Yes.
You know, it was more a musical thing
for me than actually a content thing.
Paul: I also felt if I looked back at the right
size shows, you know, seminal shows to me
like Moose and Stop calling me Vernon.
I always it drew as much not only
on a European tradition but on a kind
of British musical tradition as well.
And that kind of clashing
of those traditions together.
For me, I found so satisfying.
Was that deliberate?
Jos: Oh, yes, it was.
I wanted also, you will remember
in A Minute Too Late.
There is a dance routine. All of a sudden in Church,
we dance through some of the I throw some
of these acrobatic rock and roll moves
that sort of still hang around
in my body, already much older body
at them.
And we did this routine.
And I said, There must be a moment.
Again it's always a musical thing with me
there must be some movement
and dance and music.
And then
we said, okay, what if we actually
wrote it and invented it?
So we got Johnny Hutch on board and we got
Chris Lano on board
who started to write songs.
And we learned steps or from Tobias Tak
or from Ryan Francois who came
to who were the teachers
themselves, because -
two things were happening for me.
One was that I was back into my
cartoon
cartoon world in a Beano world.
And another thing that was happening to me
that I could also bring in
again, the absurd is a Glen Baxter,
who was actually a fan of our show,
Glen Baxter, and that refusal of- or
rather,
a hiding sense in different places,
you know, it's a hid
e and seek thing with sense.
And then we started to make,
make these shows that were very visual,
very pictorial with song and dance.
But just the way we did them within our
limitations, because we were not dance.
We were not singers you know we
worked and worked and they
managed to pull this off because I
felt that - okay -there is character.
There is a sense of surreal,
nonsensical space - why are we here?
Why is this on a boat?
What has that got to do
with flying and with Finland?
Why is this show telling us
not to call itself Vernon?
And then within that characters,
characters are sort of strange,
dream like fantasies,
like just two people who appear in jokes,
you know, like a stop calling me Vernon.
And then - okay - there is this
very eerie sense of character.
And then all of a sudden,
through music or through a weird sense
of magic, you add another level to it.
So it's constantly like a dream world.
I continue to work like that where
the musical Theatre as well.
I put layer upon layer and I
cut through it again.
But it is always done with a sense
of movement and music always.
Paul: And this kind of -
obviously, a lot the your
passion is sits in that world
and you're directing work, obviously,
as you say, in the world of music, or
do you do you find that when - do you miss
performing when you're directing?
Is it something that you -?
Jos: Yes, of course.
Of course.
I love directing.
I love teaching.
I love acting.
I love...
I also love doing things that are not
that -
entering areas or role or activities
that - University, medical schools,
prisons, areas where theatre sort of comes
as a sort of surprise - and schools.
So
these were things,
what I love.
I miss acting, but it has to be very,
very particular what I do,
it has to be utterly for me, utterly
satisfying and makes sense for me.
So it's very hard for me to be part
of a show directed by Director and then go
on a long tour with it, I
can only do that if I like we did
with Brooks, fragments of Beckett.
I could have done that again
and again and again.
It kept on being a challenge to find the
colour and the sense of these strange.
Again, it's this absurd world of Beckett,
where you constantly investigate,
like in front of the audience.
You're in this laboratory of words,
where you go if I said like this and if
I say like that, it seems the same.
But it feels different.
This is not a world they recognise.
It's a world you need to invite them in.
So I do like acting.
I like performing, but I don't like
to do the same thing for too long.
And I dont want long tours.
I get - my attention span is short.
I'm hungry for the next thing -
so that's it.
So when I say directing, also,
it is always creating in the
Paul: Yeah, no, no. Coming back to what
you're saying about collaboration.
That's the thing I
enjoyed so immensely when
you were last with us working on Charlie
and Stan, which the act of collaboration.
It was utterly joyous to me, too,
in the room
Totally, yeah In terms of performing.
And I suppose this is a
hybrid of different things.
Part lecture, part performance.
But your Art of laughter show.
Did you have any idea that it was
going to become so successful?
Jos: No, no.
I found something that I
was not looking for.
It started with Tom Morris,
then at the Battersea Arts Centre,
giving me a scratch
sort of an open evening, two nights and I
had done these master
classes all over the world.
What do we want to tour with the
British Council - with The Right Size?
One thing was very clear to the guys
from The Right Size no
teaching nada, nichts...
So I said, okay, I'll do the teaching part
and I come to Malaysia with you to Oman
with you, whatever to, to Ghana.
And often I was asked can you,
can you sort of in 2 hours, tell us,
tell us sponsors or the local school -
and share with us what you're doing.
So I did.
I did.
And I had this little formula where I
said, Well, I have to make
this has to make sense.
Then in Moscow, I did it and then
in Sarajevo, it has to make sense.
I used a few students.
If there were any good, they could
follow this thing straight away.
I did some demonstration.
I said okay.
This thing is about comedy, of course,
but it is certainly first
and foremost about the body.
And then I had to make this
statement that it's the body,
first of all, the permanent that we all
share, whether we are in Senegal
or whether we are in Thailand we're all up right.
And as soon as somebody stumbles,
we go, we react.
Hahaha.
There is something about
that this is about.
Then we have a sense of timing.
If I can, I can speak too fast or speak too slow.
Everybody knows what is the right flow.
I sort of squeezed into first three
and two and in the end,
very for even 20 minutes, I said, okay,
this is what I do in these workshops.
And then one day, once somebody
in Holland said this is fantastic.
This is so simple.
And readable this works for any audience.
I remember this.
So when Tom Morris,
invited me for this stretch,
I did it and it was verbose and long.
And I was staying
in Hamish McColl's flat - house.
And I said, I have to show
more things than say less.
So that's okay.
I opened seven doors.
And in each of the seven doors,
I do this routine.
And that's my key sentence.
But I didn't have a way in and Hamish
gave me the opening sentence.
It says, I need a way to start this show.
And I said, Here it is.
This show is about laughter.
And right now there isn't any.
And then they laugh.
And then I say, There it is.
And this always work.
Paul: No, it's wonderful.
Jos: And then I had this experience.
I had done it a few times,
and then that was the English part of it.
And then I did the same in French.
And it's in France, where when it woooosh.
Jos: Ah OK
It exploded,
Brook had heard this.
When we did Beckett
he said do it in my theatre in the Bouffes Du Nord .
I did it there and it went,
it went ballistic.
I was in the news.
I was on the front page of the papers.
The French - something happened, which is
more about the French than about me.
It is so important for them,
when they laugh to be treated
in a very intelligent way.
And I did not see this coming.
This thing is I'm playing it every Sunday
afternoon twice, and they're there.
This is
it's, how you say it's endless.
There's an endless audience
Paul: Yeah
and they keep on coming.
They just keep on coming.
They just keep on coming.
But that's France, because when I do this,
I did is in Edinburgh, at the festival,
in London.
I did it in New York.
People come to you and say
"great show, want a pint"?
But in France,
in France its a such a thing
Paul: It's a brilliant thing It's remarkable.
It's very, very,
Jos: Yeah its very interesting and thanks
to Joseph Seelig and the Mime Festival.
Paul: Jos, it's as ever brilliant
to spend time with you.
I hope we get to do that very soon
when we watch Charlie and Stan again.
And I really hope.
And we-
Jos: absolutely we're going
together, were taking the train together
Paul: We'll go with David Pugh an we'll go and see it.
But I also, I said this before,
but I'm saying it live on the podcast.
You have to come and work with Told
by an Idiot again because you are such
a brilliant imagination
for us before we finish Jos.
I'm just going to ask you seven questions.
And you say the first thing that comes
into your head as a response
to these questions.
Paul: Jack Tati or Dario Fo.?
Jos: Jack Tati
Paul: Fish and Chips or Mul et Frites?
Jos: Fish and Chips.
Paul: Ice skating or skiing?
Jos: None of those
Paul: Directing or performing?
Jos: Watching it.
Watching.
Performing
Paul: Pirate or priest?
Jos: Pirate
Paul: Mollier or Marivaux?
Jos: I would say Marivaux
Paul: Double take or slow burn?
Jos: Double take
Paul: Jos it's been an absolute pleasure. I'll
see you in the next few days in London
Jos: Okay.
Thanks, Paul.
That was wonderful.
Paul: Au revoir
Jos: Okay.
Take care.
Bye!
Paul: Dear listeners,
if you've enjoyed this idiot podcast,
please, keep it to yourself.