At the Brighton Fringe one night last month the comedy duo Siblings were sought out backstage by a stranger. She just had to tell the two sisters that Ruby Wax had been in the audience — and, what was more, had been laughing. Maddy and Marina Bye were too polite, or possibly too mischievous, to tell her that Wax is their mother. Accompanied by their father, the TV comedy director Ed Bye, the comedian turns up pretty regularly. “Even if she doesn’t know the lines, Mum will mouth them with us,” Marina says, with pride more than embarrassment.
Aged 23, Marina is the English rose of the sisters, taller and blonde with a BBC period drama face. At drama school she was cast as Shakespeare heroines and since then in rather more dubious roles that her sister, Maddy, will delight in telling me about. Three years older, but looking rather younger, Maddy is so much the spit of her mother that I am surprised the bringer of good non-news did not cotton on.
“Mum and Carrie could have lived in a hippy complex for sure
We meet for the lightest of lunches at the Picturehouse Central in Shaftesbury Avenue, London, and despite their physical dissimilarities and differing tastes in clothes — big jumper for Marina, dungarees for Maddy — you would know they were sisters, I think. They pick crumbs from each other’s cheeks and finish each other’s sentences.
“I remember absolutely hating you when you were young. You kicked my front tooth out,” Maddy says.
“By accident,” Marina says. “When I was, like, two.”
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“Aggressive little baby, she was,” Maddy says. “But you always made me laugh. I remember getting so annoyed by it because I would be laughing and I was trying to hate you.”
They still make each other laugh, even mid-performance. The first thing I see them in is a wonderful four-minute YouTube sketch in which they play two insufferably stupid products of London day schools. They admit their target is partly themselves, as alumni of the £21,000-a-year Harrodian school in Barnes, but it is more likely that their aim is set at the girls they made fun of back then. The sketch builds brilliantly on manic repetitions of the words “god” and “sheep” and the phrase “don’t eat that”. It took about 15 takes to film because they kept cracking up.
Next, and still before we meet, I see them one stiflingly hot night in a London pub as they try out their Edinburgh Fringe show. I am sitting next to one of their “unofficial godmothers”, who says as children their impressions of Wax were so good that from another room it sounded as if Ruby herself were there. There is dancing, a bit of audience participation and much fun at some very soft targets, such as the ghost-hunter show Most Haunted. They are very much the unfinished article, but still funny enough to earn a piece in The Times, whoever their parents are.
“Someone said you’d see us and think, ‘Semi-posh, nice English girls,’ but what we love the most is to shock people and be raucous and disgusting and dark,” Marina says.
“None of us are heroin addicts because my dad is great — and my mum
Well, I don’t know about that. There is a sketch about anti-bullying instructors in which the dynamic between the two is clearly bullying, but, mildly edgy though this is, it still harks back rather sweetly to their schooldays. What really sets Maddy corpsing is an obscure sketch in which they both pop in false teeth and play hillbillies living in something called the Shackety-Shack. It played like an in-joke and, it turns out, it was.
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“When we were young we used to go on crazy holidays where we’d drive for 13 hours from one state to the next, and we once drove past a tiny shack,” Marina explains. “And I think after being in a car for ten hours you go kind of insane. And so that’s where the material from Shackety-Shack came from.”
“She was about eight and she went, ‘Shackety-Shack,’ ” Maddy recalls.
So, they are telling me this joke has been going on for 15, 16 years? Yes, they are.
If it sounds as if the Bye girls’ childhood was a riot, mother and daughters outdoing one another with the comedy turns (the girls’ older brother, Max, seems to have acted more as a reliable if critically astute audience), one must remember that it cannot all have been like that. Yes, Wax was blessed with funny bones and funny friends. A regular disruptor to their childhood was the actress Carrie Fisher, whose treat was to take the family to Portobello Road market and tell them to separate and come back with the weirdest thing they could find in 20 minutes. One time she judged a puppy climbing out of a plastic egg the winner. When Fisher died at Christmas, I heard Wax on the radio saying she and Fisher had planned to run off and live in retirement together.
“They could have gone lesbian and lived in a hippy complex for the rest of their lives for sure. That would have happened,” Maddy acknowledges.
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Sad for their dad, I say. “I think my dad would have gone as well.”
Like Fisher, however, Wax has spoken frankly about her mental health problems and set up a network of Frazzled Cafés, in which people recovering from mental illness share their experiences. She has talked about her struggles in more detail recently, but when I interviewed her in 2001 she said that some years earlier she had checked into the Priory Hospital with post-natal depression after giving birth to Marina.
“Wow,” Marina says.
“Didn’t know that,” Maddy says.
Was much hidden from them, I ask.
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“I think definitely when we were younger we didn’t really have much idea, and I think that’s a testimony to our parents,” Maddy says. “They made our childhood so normal. Nothing was obscure really. When we grew up we understood it more. But mental health has never, ever been a taboo in our household. I mean, obviously it’s a horrible, horrible thing to have and we understand that, but it was all about breaking the stigma and not being afraid to talk about it.”
“That is thanks to Dad, though,” Marina adds. “He was so amazing about it when we were young and would just explain it in a really diplomatic way. You know, there was nothing to hide and he’s a very caring, amazing, solid man. None of us are heroin addicts because my dad is great — and my mum.”
“She’s, like, ‘Why are you so normal?’ ” Maddy says. “In every one of her shows that I’ve been to, someone has put their hand up and said, ‘Are your kids f***ed up?’ And we’re, like, ‘Hiya! We’re here.’ ”
Surely the reason for that is, growing up in postwar Chicago, Wax was never convinced that her parents loved her. Wax obviously loves her children to the point of devotion.
“That’s why we have the confidence we do: we have such a supportive family,” Marina says.
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After school Maddy went into PR, later discovering that her bosses had worked with the publicist Lynne Franks, the model for Jennifer Saunders’s Edina in Absolutely Fabulous. Maddy had unintentionally walked straight into her mother’s Ab Fab territory (Wax was its script editor). She was efficient, and good with people, but felt a performer lurking somewhere within her. One day she mentioned to her godfather Alan Rickman that she had heard about the École Philippe Gaulier clown school in Paris, but obviously it was not something she would join. He immediately told her to go.
“I just kissed the ground that he walked on,” Maddy says. “He was a genius, so funny, any advice he had to give me I would just take it so quickly. So, two days later I quit my job and went to clown school.”
At the same time Marina was training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she played Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Rosalind in As You Like It. “As much as I’d love to do a Lady Macbeth, there are so many other actresses who could smash that,” she says. “I’d much rather be the weird servant that comes in and has some sort of odd twitch.”
At the end of term they would compare approaches, Marina’s Rosalind with Maddy’s Shakespeare “as a fat pigeon”. At Guildhall teachers were polite and in consequence even mild criticism would send Marina sobbing to the loo. Maddy, consistently told, like her fellow students, that her performance was “dog shit”, emerged rather more robust.
Marina graduated last year and now has to face Maddy’s critique of her performances in films including How to Talk to Girls at Parties (“the biggest dud I have seen at this year’s Cannes” — Variety), in which she played an alien required to do something unprintable to humans to clone herself.
So I presume Maddy saw this and felt Marina’s career needed rescuing and they formed Siblings.
“Yeah, she saw me f***ing someone and went, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something.’ ”
In fact, Maddy says, they had always planned to work together, but did nothing about it until two years ago at the Edinburgh Fringe, where Maddy was directing a play. On a whim, they signed up for an open-mike comedy cabaret armed only with “two party poppers, a sausage and a cagoule”.
“What we realised doing that was, actually, this is really fun,” Marina says.
Siblings, on their few outings, have garnered generous reviews, but it is not the sort of success that persuades a sibling to quit her day job. Maddy still does some PR and Marina supports her acting career with children’s parties and drama coaching. They live together in a flat in Notting Hill, stealing each other’s clothes, Marina doing more of the cooking and, happily, finding Maddy’s comedian boyfriend amusing. They row when writing scripts, but make up quickly: sisters as well as friends.
Maddy plays their agent and looks after whatever they earn, but there is no parental subsidy and they will be sharing overpopulated accommodation next month in Edinburgh. Oh well, I say, maybe they will be spotted by some executive up for the television festival. They look excited. Sadly, I say, such execs see nothing and spend the whole time drinking.
At least they can be assured of two enthusiastic audience members — but are they not inhibited playing before a director of French & Saunders and the doyenne of alternative comedy?
“Really, really not inhibited with our parents,” Marina assures me.
“We want to make them laugh,” Maddy says.
“I mean,” her sibling explains, “I feel like it all came from them.”
Siblings are at the Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, August 2-28. tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/siblings
