Lano & Woodley

A Lano & Woodley show is built to look like it is falling apart. Colin Lane usually walks out with an earnest plan. He wants to stage the epic story of Moby Dick, or teach the crowd about the Wright Brothers. Frank Woodley is there to ruin it. Woodley plays the sweet, chaotic idiot who wanders into the wrong light cue, misunderstands the premise, and knocks over the set pieces. Lane plays the exasperated straight man whose temper eventually boils over. They spend the hour yelling in each other’s faces, breaking their own props, and wrestling on the ground.

They have been doing this for decades. After building a massive domestic following and landing their own Australian television show in the late nineties, they broke up in 2006. When they reunited twelve years later, they came back doing the exact same physical, combative double-act. It is one thing to do aggressive slapstick in your twenties. Watching two older men commit to hard falls and throw themselves across a stage gives the chaos an entirely different weight.

The secret to their dynamic is that neither of them is actually the smart one. Lane acts superior, but his theatrical ideas are cheap and poorly thought out. Woodley seems like a liability, but his fumbling usually exposes the fact that Lane has no idea what he is doing.

Every mistake is rehearsed to the inch. When Woodley accidentally hits Lane in the head with a tin whistle or a piece of cardboard scenery collapses right on a punchline, the timing is musical. They are doing classic clowning, just disguised as two men having a genuine breakdown.