PREVIEW
What: O Christmas Tea with James & Jamesy
Where: McPherson Playhouse
When: 7:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday
Tickets: $19.50, $24, $28 (250-386-6121 or 1-888-717-6121) Also online at jamesandjamesy.com/o-christmas-tea
Setting their shows within the context of a polite English tea gives James & Jamesy extra laugh power.
So say Vancouver’s James (a.k.a. Aaron Malkin) and Jamesy (a.k.a. Alastair Knowles), a faux-English, tea-swigging comedy duo. Since teaming up in 2012, these Vancouverites have become something of an underground phenomenon, selling 25,000 tickets to their shows. Critics routinely give them five-star reviews; fringe-festival audiences line up for their performances.
The show coming to the McPherson Playhouse, O Christmas Tea, is about a tea party gone awry. To the consternation of James (the bowler-hatted straight man), Jamesy (a fuss-bucket eccentric in a bad wig) spills his tea. It not only floods his home, it spills out to the entire world.
“This leads to a lot of classic aquatic narratives, like Jaws and Noah’s ark and the Titanic,” said Knowles.
To create the illusion of a tea-filled universe, the show employs sound effects, lighting and voices that gurgle.
James & Jamesy’s comedy is a bit surreal — their conversations are sometimes reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s clowns. Knowles says the shows have been described as “walking out of a Monty Python film into a Dr. Seuss book.”
Interactions with the audience are de rigueur.
Two of their other shows are 2 for Tea and High Tea. In the world of James & Jamesy, tea-time looms large.
“It gives our shows an air of properness in the face of all the absurdity that follows,” Knowles said. “Tea is a through-line that we use to ground the performance.”
Jamesy is by far the stranger of the two characters. He’s a politely demented English twit with a raging obsessive-compulsive disorder. Knowles says Jamesy is, in fact, a parody of Malkin’s real personality.
“When I go to Aaron’s house, it’s important that I put my shoes in a certain place. It’s important that if I unplug something — say, to charge my computer — that I plug back in whatever it was. Put everything back in its place,” he said.
“In my daily life, I’m much more casual. I lose things all the time. I lost my wallet yesterday. Aaron found it this morning.”
Malkin, sharing the phone line with his cohort, agreed that he’s super-organized and a “little bit obsessive.” Here’s his example. Waiting in the wings to make his entry, Malkin will watch Knowles/ Jamesy set up the tea service.
“I’ll see him touch the rim of a cup. I’ll think, I wouldn’t touch my fingers where someone’s lips are going to be,” he said, chuckling.
Malkin, who has a biology degree, didn’t begin in theatre. He worked for a year for a bio-tech firm in Sweden, but found the work too isolating.
“I didn’t want to be behind a microscope for the rest of my life,” Malkin said.
So he switched gears, teaching for four years in Colombia. Among other things, he coached students on dramatic arts, even through he wasn’t trained in it. And that got him passionate about theatre.
He met Knowles — who has a business degree — back in Vancouver. The pair first performed together in Parade of the Lost Souls, a free-for-all (costumes, fire-dancers, musicians) assembled by the Dusty Flowerpot Cabaret, an East Vancouver artists’ collective. Afterward, Knowles and Malkin decided they liked working together. They began self-producing their own comedy shows, renting small theatres.
The pair had no concrete ambitions. However, the first time they debuted James & Jamesy, they realized they were onto something.
“After the show, we met a few key people whose opinions we really respect. They said: ‘You’ve got gold here. You can mine it if you want,’ ” Knowles said.
An underlying message — a serious one — lurks within all their shows. Despite being vastly different, the characters of James and Jamesy strive to understand and accept one another. In this way, their experience of life is expanded and enriched.
This, in turn, mirrors the real-life friendship of Malkin and Knowles.
“The longer we work together, the clearer our differences become to me,” Malkin said. “Yet, there’s also this underlying desire to trust and connect and understand each other.”
