Interview: Sleeping Trees

Award-winning comedy trio Sleeping Trees – they of the hit genre-based comedy shows Mafia?, Western? and Sci-Fi? – are back at the Wardrobe Theatre this Christmas, with a fast, funny and festive selection of brand new sketches.

Chuck on your favourite Christmas jumper, load up on figgy pudding and join the chaps for an evening of the heartiest festive laughs. Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, shepherds, wise men, angels, donkeys, Santa Claus, elves, snowmen, reindeer, the Queen and Bono will all be making an appearance in this brandy-butter-soaked selection of brand new sketches from the award-winning comedy trio.

“James Dunnell-Smith, Joshua George Smith and John Woodburn jump from character to character with a seemingly unnatural elasticity,” said Time Out’s four-star review. “They come from a tradition of anarchic buffoonery that’s underpinned by a militantly controlled skill.”

We grabbed a quick chat with the Trees.

“anarchic buffoonery underpinned by a militantly controlled skill,” said one critic. What *is* the balance between buffoonery and rigorous preparation in your act?
I think we have been working together for so long now that we are quite in tune with how each other perform and their way of thinking, so because of that we are able to keep each other in check and maintain control of a show.
Having said that, we are also idiots who enjoy sabotaging ourselves and each other – so a lot of that gets thrown out of the window, which can either make or break a show.

Without giving too much away, what can we expect from your Nativity ?
This show is going to be a wide variety of Christmas-based sketches with our version of the Nativity story thrown in as well. We will be visiting Santa, reindeer, families at Christmas, offices playing Secret Santa and various yuletide children, as well as covering the full story of Christmases birthday boy himself.

Tell us about the creative process. How do your sketches evolve? Does one of you write it down, do you flesh it out in the room together?
For this show we have all written a load of sketches and then come together and worked on shaping them up into a full-on Christmas extravaganza. While the original ideas may have stemmed from just one of us, we all worked together to make them into a complete sketch and, gradually, a complete show.

What makes for a great sketch? Is sketch comedy somewhere on a spectrum between stand-up and theatre?
A great sketch can come from anything, and a truly great sketch will often leave you thinking “Why hasn’t anyone thought of that before?”. Simplicity often reaps more rewards than trying to be cleverer than you need to be. We’d say that sketch is one of the key pillars on the spectrum, along with stand-up and theatre. There are stand-ups whose act is very theatrical, theatre shows that include compact sketches, and sketch acts comprised of stand-ups – as well as any other mix you can think of. And that’s fine, why not?

What would you all be doing, if not this?
Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and drug dealer.

The Sleeping Trees Nativity: A Christmas Sketch Show Dec 19-22, Wardrobe Theatre. For more info, visit thewardrobetheatre.com/livetheatre/sleeping-trees-nativity-christmas-sketch-show