You take your actors and a space and there you go he says

“You take your actors and a space and there you go,” he says.He already has plans for future productions. There is a play by Graham Greene, called The Complacent Lover, and a work by another Russian dramatist, Bulgakov, he is keen to put on “Hopefully, through doing this, I gain experience,” he says. “Quite a lot of people are coming to see Gamblers and I’m hoping someone will then trust me with a ‘proper’ theatre.”‘Gamblers’: Camden People’s Theatre, NW1 (020 7916 5878) to 22 Oct. This is getting silly. I’ve arranged to interview Peepolykus (pronounced “people like us”), only they are a day late.

When I do finally hook up with this touring theatrical threesome, I am led a peculiarly merry dance from one closed cafe to the next, in London’s Finsbury Park. That’s while they tell me how they missed the ferry from Ireland – twice. Apparently somebody swallowed a marble but nobody told them that the boat had turned around

This is getting silly. I’ve arranged to interview Peepolykus (pronounced “people like us”), only they are a day late. When I do finally hook up with this touring theatrical threesome, I am led a peculiarly merry dance from one closed cafe to the next, in London’s Finsbury Park. That’s while they tell me how they missed the ferry from Ireland – twice. Apparently somebody swallowed a marble but nobody told them that the boat had turned around.
Now, you may, like me, have had a little trouble following that explanation.

But the sheer daffiness of it makes sense in a funny sort of way. After all, Peepolykus – whose latest show, Goose Nights, opens at the Lyric Hammersmith this week – are phenomenally loopy clowns who are truly in their element in the realms of the Absurd.Co-founder John Nicholson is the English one with the Stan Laurelesque vertical hair. His two freewheeling pals with sweet faces and preposterously strong Spanish accents are the spruce, Barcelona-born David Sant and the scruffier ex-pat Basque Javier Marzan. Even if their time-keeping is lousy, all in all they are an irresistibly charming bunch. Living up to their name, they make punters of all ages hoot at their childish antics, digressions, non sequiturs and slapstick ineptitude.But back in the winter of 1995, when our triumvirate first teamed up, Nicholson was close to throwing in the towel “I was in crisis,” he admits “I didn’t want to be just a jobbing actor. I longed to do something with more pizzazz, something less story-based than other physical theatre companies, something madder. I saw David in a show and I just rang him up cold and discovered he and Javier had already talked about working on a joint project.” Soon after, all three started making high-energy mayhem.

Their first devised show, Let the Donkey Go, involved – if I remember rightly – deliriously hopeless military manoeuvres, a glove puppet rendition of “Old MacDonald had a Farm” and the mass destruction of digestive biscuits.The year after, in I am a Coffee, a postman was sent back to the future only to encounter two fishmongers with an inexplicable hunger for impersonations of the Pope. That, in turn, was followed by Horses For Courses which, spoofing all things East European, threw together calamitous Cossack dancing and an all-purpose Chekhovian drama featuring suicides at the end of every scene.What, one wonders, has formatively induced such sprees of cavorting insanity? Nicholson (a surprisingly quiet and lucid soul offstage) surmises: “My previous career as a psychiatric nurse probably informs my work a lot because in that environment everything considered normal is thrown into disarray. But way before that,” he goes on, “I just loved the Marx Brothers. I used to miss family Christmas dinners, because I wanted to watch their films.”Peepolykus have been hailed as the new Groucho and co in some quarters, though Sant quibbles that he can’t really see the parallel. “During my early years I was more fascinated by Buster Keaton,” (or “Bastard Kitten” according to his somewhat surreal Catalonian pronunciation) Marzan originally yearned to be a serious thesp. “But then,” he says, “I saw that there it’s all method acting and the audience looks at you through a microscopic hole With clowning, the wall is down, everybody’s there together.