Max and Ivan relish the chance to take Fringe hit on the road and play at Glasgow’s ‘crucible of comedy greatness’

Comedy duo Max and Ivan can’t wait to bring their critically acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe show back north of the border.

After receiving rave reviews at the comedy festival last summer, the duo bring Commitment, the tale of Max’s efforts to organise Ivan’s stag do – to The Stand in Glasgow on February 9.

“The Stand is completely legendary, an almost mythical crucible of comedy greatness. We’re absolutely overjoyed to be playing there, it’ll be a delight,” Max Olesker tells The Sunday Post.

“The Fringe was a joy, it had been a couple of years since we’d done a full run, so I wasn’t sure how it was going to go.

“It was also a slightly different type of performance to what we’ve done previously. It was lovely to be back and performing a true storytelling show close to the heart, and I was relieved at the way it was received.”

In previous shows, the duo have taken on the roles of hundreds of characters as they spin fantastical fables, leaving the audience in stitches.

But this time around, it was a lot more personal as it was a tale where they themselves were the lead protagonists.

“This is the first time we’ve had a very true, personal story to tell so it was about placing us more at the forefront of it and seeing whether or not people would care,” Max says.

Ivan’s first big dream was to make it big in rock band, spending several years trying to make it happen. It never quite got off the ground, so Max decided to do something about it in the ‘extraordinarily elaborate’ stag weekend he organised last year.

“My idea for the stag was to attempt to bring his original band back together for one night,” he explains. “It didn’t go entirely as planned, so you’ll have to come along to find out what happened.

“It was a lovely nostalgia trip building the show and going back to our family homes and dredging up these long forgotten photographs and seeing the journey we’ve gone on from then to now.

“There’s a lot more of the real us within the show. There’s an array of deeply shameful pictures of us going through those various awkward adolescent phases we go through, although maybe other people’s weren’t as awkward as ours!”

Oh mamma! Our tour kicks off THIS WEEKEND! We're super delighted to be taking COMMITMENT on the road. It's in both @guardian and @chortle's top 10 comedy shows of 2019 and we think it's our BEST.

We can't stress this enough – PLEASE BUY TICKETS: https://t.co/GuIhe8eZ4W pic.twitter.com/iEdp6pX1R5

— Max & Ivan (@maxandivan) January 17, 2020

The duo started doing comedy together at Royal Holloway University in London. Unlike other universities, there was no great comedy society, but the pair came together performing sketches on the student radio station.

“We took a version of that show to the Fringe that year,” Max recalls. “We discovered Edinburgh, this extraordinary world of performance where you could get on stage with an idea or even half an idea.

“It was exciting and invigorating and became the focus of our time writing together, having another idea and going back and developing as performers and writers.”

While Ivan had dreamed of being a rockstar, it has always been Max’s dream to make it in the comedy scene, growing up with the likes of The Goon Show, Victoria Wood and The League of Gentlemen.

“Comedy was always a huge influence on what I wanted to do as a career,” he recalls. “I didn’t have pushy stage parents or anything but they were very supportive and led me to believe that, as long as I worked incredibly hard, in theory anything was possible. I took them at their word perhaps to their eternal regret, but here I am still doing it.

“I enjoyed character comedy more than stand-up and even the stand-up I enjoyed was more often slightly off-key, different to straight stand-up.

“One of the first gigs I went to was Rich Hall, a stand-up legend, but I saw him as Otis Lee Crenshaw, who is his gravel-voiced Texan jailbreak hick character.

“It was brilliant, it was live and immediate like stand-up but also other-worldly. The whole thing absolutely blew my mind and it was the same feeling I had the first time I went to see a play, that this was something you could literally do as your job.

“If people could do that, then I’m a person and I wanted to try to make it my job.”

Fortunately, it was goal that Max would eventually achieve, with the added bonus of being able to do it with his best friend.

While they haven’t got a rock and roll tour bus – it’ll be the train or a car they’ll be in – heading out on the road is something the duo will never take for granted.

Max says: “It’s super cool. It’s a dream come true to do this as a job, to write a show and take it out on the road.

“I think it’s important to remember that when we’re driving back cold, tired and miserable at seven in the morning due to some traffic jam!

“You’ve got to keep the joy at the heart of it, it’s a very silly job.”