We sat down for an exclusive interview with award-winning comedy duo (and IRL sisters), SIBLINGS, who are taking their sold-out Edinburgh Fringe show on tour across the UK with their most raucous show yet, Dreamweavers.
Tour dates and tickets here
Dreamweavers dives straight into the subconscious. At what point did you realise your brains were strange enough to be a full show—and did anything in the process genuinely surprise you about each other?
We actually thought it was a really mad show and that people would either be on board or be completely terrified but the people liked it so actually everyone’s mad too! It’s surprising how much strangers love having their dreams performed in front of them.. Even if it’s pure filth. We are dream providers now and this is definitely a surprising calling for us.
Outside of the characters, Marina did an entire show bleeding from her hand constantly and holding it in a tight fist throughout because she hurt herself on a sharp edge pre show. The biggest surprise is how many people thought it was part of the show and reviewers called it ‘clever’..
Your comedy thrives on physicality and chaos, but it’s incredibly precise. How much of your work is instinctive sibling energy, and how much is carefully engineered madness?
Thank you, we always strive for precise chaos so that is a HUGE compliment. We would say half and half. We haven’t done one show that hasn’t somehow descended into chaos. Our writing is engineered, what happens live on stage sometimes can be a whole other story. It is surprising how many times we will completely and randomly move or say something at the exact same time and it’s not written in the script. It looks choreographed but it comes from nowhere. The give away when that happens is that we are so shocked ourselves we end up hysterical.
The Sibling instinctiveness always helps in moments like these and we can read each other so well on stage, we know when to jump in and when to let the other one go for gold. We enjoy chaos when it is on purpose and makes sense to the story so we are glad its working!
You trained in very different worlds: Gaulier clowning and Guildhall acting. How do those two disciplines clash or collide in the rehearsal room, and where do you feel they fuse most powerfully on stage?
At the beginning of ‘Siblings’, Marina found it heart breaking when a joke wouldn’t land whilst Maddy would marvel in it and turn it into something even funnier. During one show in our first Edinburgh run, all the power went out during our show and Marina literally stood in a Tableau for the entire power outage. Maddy meanwhile made everyone get their torches out and did a whole Robbie Williams concert in the dark. Once the lights came back on, Marina leapt back into the scene. It was perfect..
There are moments where Maddy will go off on some weird clown tangent and Marina will watch in horror but then slowly see the crowd get won over and sigh in relief that we live to see another day. Over time this has become something Marina has learnt and now it’s become a wildly dangerous show where she’s clowning around left, right & centre, its absolute carnage.
How do you decide when a sketch is “finished,” especially in a show that leans into dream logic rather than narrative sense?
Without giving away too much, the show follows the story of two scientists trying to discover this new invention they have made, so there is, for the first time, a bit of a narrative arch (can you believe it). Every dream (or sketch) helps Dr Gargle and Raph Bambgi (its an anagram name, can you figure it out?) get closer to understanding their complex and beautiful invention, they all have secret messages within them to push the story forward. What we found was that when you make a sketch show set inside peoples subconscious, you can LITERALLY do anything and be anywhere so it allowed us to go into other dimensions, the weirder the better really. So they end the way most sketches will hopefully end, on a punchline.. But upside down or in space or drowning in your own piss (literally happens in the show).
Being real-life sisters is central to your chemistry, but also a creative risk. How do you protect the relationship while constantly mining it for material, tension, and humour?
One good thing is that we are able to be so brutal. Once Marina came with a list of sketch ideas and Maddy laughed in her face and went and got an egg and cress sandwich mid way through the list. Maddy has also run to Marina to tell her about a really long and thought out idea for a new sketch and Marina has thumbs down like in Gladiator. No one is offended. You can cut the bull sh** with your sibling, it saves a lot of time.
In terms of the personal relationship, we don’t speak unless in a rehearsal room for legal reasons.
After sold-out Fringe runs and now a UK and European tour, what feels different about performing this show away from Edinburgh and what do you hope audiences take away once they wake up from your dream-state?
We are so excited to see how different places react to the dream show. We liked that no matter what, the audiences really lit up when they thought their dream was being played out in front of them. We think / hope no matter where we go, that joy will stay alive. People love to be involved and we love being involved with the audience. some don’t like to be involved.. but unfortunately that’s just as funny. So we think that will travel well, like how curry sometimes travels well or pizza but not things like scrambled egg or soup.