THE GORGEOUS BOURGEOIS & MAURICE

Hello! What are you up to today at the Toynby Studios? 

GEORGE: We are working on a new show/project, it’s kind of a musical that we’ve been sort of working on since January, which is exciting.

For the uninitiated, tell us who Bourgeois and Maurice are?

GEORGE: Bourgeois and Maurice are a brother and sister who have had a very strange upbringing and have now given themselves the unofficial role of social advisors. They have a double act and they sing songs in a social way, but with no moral compass.

So what was your first performance gig?

GEORGE: It was at Madame Jojo’s in Soho in the summer of 2007.

MAURICE: It was a night named ‘Finger in the Pie Cabaret’ and it showcases on a Sunday every month.

GEORGE: We’d written four songs and we wanted somewhere to perform them and it was a real inclusive, kind of anything goes type atmosphere there. They just let performers do whatever they want, so we decided to do it and we got a load of bookings, and accidentally ended up with a career!

And what performance artists do you admire in London yourself?

MAURICE: There’s loads, but David Hoyle I think is very inspirational in lots of ways. He’s also so funny!

GEORGE: And Scottee as well. He kind of supported us at the very beginning.

MAURICE: He’s always very inventive, you never quite know what he’s going to do next. He’s always going to piss someone off.

You always need a bit of edge! Let’s talk about the new show, Sugartits, what’s it about?

MAURICE: Everything and nothing. It’s kind of ten songs that we’ve written and each song has a different contemporary subject, ranging from social networks to the myth of global warming – is it a myth? And we speak about other things: privacy…

GEORGE: Privacy. And we kind of skirt around the issue of how horrifically awful The Daily Mail is.

I’m looking forward to it. So, it’s kind of like a social commentary?

GEORGE: Yeah, but with a heavy dose of irony.

And you’ve performed Sugartits at the Edinburgh Festival before? How did it go? 

MAURICE: Not this year, last year in 2012. I think it went well, from that we did a tour around the UK and then took it to Australia, so yeah it went well!

GEORGE: It’s pretty exciting because normally the London slot would happen quite early in the life of a show but this time because we took it to Edinburgh and then toured it around the UK we haven’t actually been in London yet so we can finish off actually –

MAURICE: Where we live!

How do you come up with your new material?

MAURICE: It varies each time. It tends to be that we’ll start writing it and then we go ‘Oh, I hate it’, and we’ll go back to a conversation we had a few minutes ago. It tends to be very hard to pinpoint how it starts or why it starts, but normally something is read about or came on our minds –

GEORGE: We’re kind of all passively or not taking in inspiration of what’s going on in the world, whether we like it or not, and sometimes we’ll be like ‘we should really write a song about this’, but actually we’ll suddenly find the connection is something else.

MAURICE: It’s sort of like going to the pub and having a conversation, that’s essentially what writing a song is like for us!

What would you ideally want people spilling out from the theatre onto the streets of Soho to be feeling?

MAURICE: I wouldn’t ideally want people just thinking about one thing, but maybe, sounding a bit wanky, just the context of looking at things a bit harder, but also with humour, because whilst we do criticise I hope we do so with good humour. And sometimes the best way to critique or tackle something is through making light or making fun of it, in a way.

GEORGE: There’s a sort of nihilistic aspect to everything we do, but at the same time we’re talking about issues, and actually there are things that people take for granted and they should be speaking about.

 

• Sugartits will be at the Soho Theatre Downstairs (21 Dean Street, Soho, W1D 3NE) running from Monday 9th to Saturday 21st September, 9.30pm. Tickets £10-29. Booking: 020 7478 0100. 

• Check out Bourgeois & Maurice on YouTube: GeorgeoisBourgeois.

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