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Caro Meets Comedy Interview
Birthday Girls: Party Vibes
By Caro Moses | Published on Thursday 4 December 2014
If you are a comedy aficionado, you’ve probably heard of Birthday Girls, given the recent critical acclaim accorded to them up at that old Edinburgh Festival; you might also be aware that they are formed from the ashes of the also rather successful Ladygarden.
The trio are all set to give us a pre-Christmas comic treat by heading to Soho Theatre for a short run of their successfully road-tested 2014 show ‘Party Vibes’. I sent some questions over to Beattie Edmondson, Rose Johnson and Camille Ucan, and in one voice, they answered them.
CM: For those who haven’t see you perform before, can you describe your style of comedy?
BG: Sketchy, dancey, charactery, silly, weirdy.
CM: For those who have, can you tell them what to expect from ‘Party Vibes’? Does it have a central theme or narrative?
BG: The legends that come to see ‘Party Vibes’ can expect a super-fun sketch show with dancing, pure and simple. It doesn’t have a narrative (we learnt our lesson last year when we went in hard and called the show 2053 therefore committing to setting it in the future). What we’ve since learned is that you don’t need a narrative when you’ve got dance moves like ours. There’s no central theme either unless you count ‘having the best and most rewarding hour of your life’.
CM: Why did Lady Garden end? How did you come up with the name Birthday Girls?
BG: Lady Garden ended because gradually one by one half the members left to pursue different/ more successful careers and the three of us decided to renew our comedy vows with each other and celebrated with a sweet re-brand. We came up with the name Birthday Girls whilst dawdling along a street in Soho. We’d already rejected ‘Dog Party’ and ‘Nothing But The Pug’ that day so in comparison Birthday Girls seemed a pretty good choice.
CM: Who or what influences your comedy?
BG: Weird people, TV, popular culture, other great comedians, each other, cloud formations.
CM: Can we go back to the beginning? How did you all end up pursuing performing careers? Is this where you expected your life to go, back when you were, say, ten years old?
BG: We all met at university in Manchester and started dicking about doing sketches in various formations. We took our first show to Edinburgh the year we graduated and have been doing it since then. In this game, it’s best not to think too much about your ten-year-old self’s life expectations as they definitely didn’t include trying to source tinned lychees on a Sunday in Angel so that you can stick them on your fingers to represent eyes in a sketch. To be honest, this question has sent us into a spiral of self-doubt.
CM: And where do you see this going? Where do you hope to find yourselves in ten years time?
BG: Ok, this isn’t helping, You sound like our mums. Don’t worry, we can all re-train as lawyers. There’s still time. Ideally though we will have made a brilliant and popular TV show and be performing wildly successful sketch comedy shows all over the country/ world.
CM: Do you all get on well all of the time? Do you enjoy working together?
BG: Being creative in a group necessitates debates, and we think it’s important to discuss conflict openly and then resolve it as we think this results in better work. We love working together and will do until we die (which will be together).
CM: Your press shots are a bit Christmassy; you’ve all got nice shiny party hats on. Are you all looking forward to the festive season, or are you Scroogey about it?
BG: We LOVE Christmas. We wish it could be Christmas every day. That’s a good line actually. Maybe we’ll write a song about it.
CM: What are your plans for the immediate future? Any more shows coming up?
BG: We’re focusing on making our run at the Soho Theatre the best show possible, and after that we’ll be getting our chalk and slates out to start writing new material for next year’s show! We’re also developing some ideas for TV and online that will hopefully see the light of day in the coming months.
Birthday Girls perform ‘Party Vibes’ from 9-13 Dec at Soho Theatre, see this page here for more info and tickets.
LINKS: www.sohotheatre.com | birthdaygirlscomedy.com | twitter.com/bdaygirlscomedy
