After an incredibly well-received run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Jonny & The Baptists are set to take their production The Happiness Index on a UK tour. Blending mental health with politics and personal tragedy, The Happiness Index uses musical comedy, sharp social commentary and raw emotional honesty to create this poignant and hilarious production. We took the opportunity to speak with the team behind Jonny & The Baptists to tell us more.
Q) Hello. Before we begin, please could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work with Jonny & The Baptists?
Hello! We’re Jonny and Paddy, two best friends/begrudging colleagues, and Jonny & The Baptists is a live patchwork display of that friendship. Part theatre company, part comedy band, part satirical activists and part bickering storytellers - it’s a little hard to put a finger on what it is we actually *do*, much to the dismay of any interviewer or publication who may need that exact information in a concise, considered sentence. What I can tell you is we enjoy every minute of it and I think that’s the heart of our shows.
Q) Can you tell us a little bit more about your show The Happiness Index?
The Happiness Index charts the nation’s spiralling mental health over the last fourteen years, told through the lens of our own personal lives. At the beginning of our story, a certain prime minister - let’s call him David for the sake of anonymity - decided Britain needed to be happier, and his party would be the perfect choice to achieve that. David introduced a national Happiness Index in the form of a tediously long and tremendously out of touch survey which was so brilliantly successful it was almost immediately swept under the rug and never spoken of again. The Happiness Index takes a good hard look at the party in question and the resulting mental health crises, endless funding cuts and global embarrassment thrust upon the UK, worsening with almost pinpoint precision every time a new brilliant leader was put in charge. It’s largely two best friends just trying to be happy in the face of relentless political disasters. Oh and there are songs. I promise we’re fun. It is primarily fun jokes.
Q) Your show The Happiness Index focuses on blending mental health with discussions on the political and societal landscape. Why do you think it’s so important for these themes to be explored in theatre?
It’s not exactly groundbreaking to say that comedy and tragedy walk hand-in-hand, however it is true for a reason. The ability to deal with national grief or gradual societal collapse is hard to come by naturally (particularly following a very long period of what has felt like falling down a never-ending pointy hill) but the arts does offer a way of being able to not only engage with but enjoy talking and laughing together about current issues. Theatre is ultimately about connection and experiencing something all together in a room, and much like in our personal lives it is always easiest to talk about something tricky if you can also have a laugh.
The arts are an astonishingly important part of our culture, and in a time of abating dark news cycles and an ever-increasing amount of information to take in and sift through, I do think it’s the artists who try to hold a candle up and help you see through the static. That’s what we’re trying to do in this show! It’s ultimately a show about being happy, and we think there’s a way to do that whilst also having to present some hard subject matter. Picture two wombles arguing and laughing about trauma - it’s sort of that.
Q) These are quite serious themes to dissect - what made you decide to take a comedic approach to dissecting these themes?
Now I seem to have made an error here in that I think we answered this question in the last question. How much of a problem is that? Isn’t it odd that at school we were told to read to the end of the question in every single test and exam and yet somehow the two of us have reached a collective age of seventy-four and did exactly the opposite of that. We will never learn.
Q) You had a very successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe with this show. What did you learn as theatre makers during your time there? Can audiences expect any changes to the show since its Ed Fringe run?
This Edinburgh Fringe run was a delight (we think it was our tenth one together?), and I think that our big lessons were largely down to the people around us. Each year the arts gets a little bit harder, from funding squeezes to mounting barriers to entry and a shift in how we engage with what we see or do. However, this year was a real reminder of how damn hard everyone is trying. In the face of all of that, and (much like the themes of our show) a governmentally terrible decade for all of us, it is rather beautiful to see people still creating and presenting their thoughts and views and laughter to audiences who need it more than ever.
We all have to carry this industry together, and it really isn’t easy, but we both came away from this year thinking you know what - there is hope if we just keep going, together. Not gonna lie - pretty tough to write satire when the political landscape changes every nine to ten minutes - but there’ll be some new (better), exciting (rewritten) and surprising (a lot of it is improvised) bits coming on this tour which we’ve been building in anticipation of the tour. We’re hugely excited to still be here, and to share it with you.
Q) What can audiences expect and why should audiences come along?
We’ve done it again haven’t we. As you can tell we both talk a lot (appropriate, for jobbing talkers) and once again didn’t read ahead. I’ll try and summarise. EXPECT: Laughing at things you didn’t expect to laugh about, getting suddenly a bit emotional, and a sense of possibly controlled comedy-musical-theatrical chaos. WHY: Keep the arts alive, we would love to meet you all, and we could all do with a bit of happiness, right?
The Happiness Index tours around the UK from the 21st February to the 21st June.
Photography by Matt Crockett
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