We’ve been called the Spinal Tap of theatre!” Or so I’m informed by Bill Arnold, one of the three American actors in Triple Espresso. The show has just finished a run in Minneapolis and is now being staged at Andrew’s Lane.
And in ways he’s right. The play has been described as ‘a highly caffeinated comedy’ and raises that pivotal philosophical and political question, ‘What did three guys do in four minutes that got them barred from show business for life? And why would they do it again 25 years later?’ But what they did and why they’d have a repeat performance of that catastrophe I am not at liberty to say and Arnold ain’t revealing either. If he did, the punch line of the production would sink like, well, a spoonful of sugar in a cup of coffee. But Bill does tell us a little more about Triple Espresso, which details the rags-to-rags story of Hugh Butternut, Buzz Maxwell and Bobby Bean.
“Triple Espresso, apart from being called the Spinal Tap of theatre has been compared, as a comedy, to an evening with the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges,” he says. “It’s not total slap-stick because the story is about three guys who were a comedy team, unintentionally, in the ‘70s and they’ve been holding a grudge for 25 years. But their big break came in 1978 on a day when Orson Welles and Tom Jones cancelled their appearances on a TV show and they were in a panic so they put us on and what we did was the single most embarrassing moment in television history so we were banned from television for life. Remember those were the days of live television in the '70s and things could get volatile. But the point is that we were an act that had auditioned and they never had any real intention of putting us on but they found themselves over a barrel the day we auditioned and without any other guests to put on the show they stuck us on. But we tried to up the ante by doing something other than what we had auditioned with and what we ended up doing – well, I can’t tell you. You gotta come see the show in Dublin!”
Needless to say Bill Arnold, who plays Buzz Maxwell ‘an uncertain magician with attitude’ and who himself has performed at comedy and magic clubs all over the world, is delighted that anyone would compare this trio to classic comedy artists such as the Marx Brothers or Three Stooges.
“Well, we grew up watching American television so we always were inspired by guys like the Marx Brothers whose movies were still being run on TV at the time,” he says. ‘And we were inspired by the great sitcoms of the ‘70s because the writing was so clever and the characters were so rich. In things like the Andy Griffiths show, the characters really were so hysterical. Yet people who come to see our show know that to execute comedic timing as we do you have to have tons of discipline and tons of practice and everyone still does look at the Marx Brothers and The Stooges, for sure, and see, say, that there is not a lot of margin for error when you are swinging a mallet at somebody’s head! “
This is actually the sixth time Triple Espresso has played in Ireland and at one point the show was so popular “it ran for 36 weeks”, as Brian reminds me.
“And last time we were there, last summer, we had people back for the fifth and sixth time and they keep bringing friends and family and people back to experience it,” he continues. “Because at a certain point they enjoy watching the responses of their friends and family, or so they often tell us. Because really this is a fun night out and, to tell you the truth, every time I leave Ireland, I leave kicking and screaming because I have a blast there and I think that, too, is part of what comes across on stage.”