The brilliant Living Spit return to Bristol this Christmas

Last time we heard from local comic theatre duo Living Spit, they had just returned from their first ever run in London, performing their wonderful multi-character Tudor romp The Six Wives of Henry VIII – and getting nominated for a prestigious Off-West End Award into the bargain.

A sold-out week for the show back in the city where it had started, Bristol, rounded off an excellent spring – with a busy summer’s touring waiting in the wings. Then came COVID and the total shutdown of the theatre landscape.

Now, though, Living Spit – aka Howard Coggins and Stu McLoughlin – are back on the road. They squeezed in a tour of Somerset and Dorset with the brilliant Six Wives before Lockdown 2.0 hit, and now the duo’s latest multi-character, songs-and-silliness, quicksilver-costume-changes slice of musical comedy excellence, Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast, premieres in their hometown Clevedon from December 4-6, before taking up residence as Bristol Old Vic’s Christmas 2020 show (December 8-January 2).

We caught up with Stu and Howard ahead of their nicely busy winter.

How was lockdown for you both? Were you able to keep collaborating and exchanging ideas remotely, or is the way you work necessarily a face-to-face thing?
Sort of. We’d already decided that we were going to do The Living Spit Podcast, and so we set to work on that. We made the first one the week before lockdown and we have made 19 episodes since then, one about each show we’ve done with a couple of multi-episode editions about the bigger ones.

The podcasts have proved to be a bit of a hit, at least to the people who listen to them. We’ve also been writing our brand new show, Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast, so we did have stuff to be getting on with…

How has it felt being back performing again…. and how is the whole socially-distanced theatre experience?
It’s been great actually. It’s taken a bit of adjusting to, as some audiences are wearing masks, but luckily Howard has carefully scripted an ad lib to take care of that! But I think people are so desperate to get out of the house that we could literally do anything and they’d clap. And luckily, playing to a few faces dotted around a large auditorium is something we’ve grown used to. We once played Runcorn.

Living Spit toured their brilliant Tudor comedy ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’ one last time this autumn. Pic: Farrows Creative

Tell us whatever you can about Beauty and the Beast… has it got the usual Living Spit ingredients of music, silliness, lightning role changes, and brilliant comic chemistry?
Ahh… You flatter us, and it would be self-aggrandising to agree with your description of our work – but yes, it has all of those things. In abundance. We have no doubt it’s going to go down in the annals of British theatre history as the greatest two-man musical rendering of Beauty and the Beast performed in Bristol and its environs in 2020.

Six Wives… was partly born from Howard’s resemblance to Henry VIII. Was there anything that kicked off this show for you – any routine you had, a love for the Beauty and the Beast storyline…?
If we were any other company, I imagine we’d have an answer for this. About how we feel that this is the right time to explore the concept of beauty in our increasingly individualistic and narcissistic society, of the different expectations of men and women when it comes to appearance, for instance.

Not Living Spit. We simply agree on a title in a panicky ten minutes roughly 18 months before because there is a theatre wanting to know what we’re going to do, and then regret it when we come to write it as we’ve got absolutely no ideas. It’s an approach that seems to have worked thus far, and we don’t see any reason to change it.

Living Spit’s Beauty and the Beast is at the Theatre Shop, Clevedon from Dec 4-6 and Bristol Old Vic from Dec 8-Jan 2. For more info, visit www.livingspit.co.uk, www.theatreshop.org.uk and www.bristololdvic.org.uk

Read more: Bristol Hippodrome’s 2020 pantomime