Cometh the Man

It is a Thursday night, and I am making orgasm noises into a microphone in front of 200 people, with a man pretending to be Ryan Gosling’s mother. As it happens, I am also on a first date.

Worries race through my head: is this funny? Where is this going to go next? Am I being dominated, or dominating? Laughed at, or with? What am I revealing about myself? To the audience? To my date? Does she think this is what I really sound like, when… you know?

“Such a high-pitched moan, for such a hirsute and burly man,” Ryan Gosling’s mother purrs. The surprisingly low voice in fact belongs to Adam Riches, playing the character of this unlikely temptress, who has demanded that I breach her defences like a horse entering Troy. The crowd roars its approval. I feel both victorious, and a little confused.

Such confusion will be familiar to any man who has sat on Adam Riches’ front row over the last seven years. His is an act that thrives on uncomfortable audience interactions, which push at the limits of what a semi-coerced ‘volunteer’ is willing to do for laughs.

These volunteers are almost always men, and typically the character that they are presented with when they walk up onstage presents some sort of macho, male archetype for them to rub up against, figuratively and sometimes even literally. Ryan Gosling’s mother is an unusual, female exception to this rule. But the internal wranglings that the audience member goes through when presented with this oddly masculine woman are similar.

“I find it hilarious,” explains Riches, “how men present themselves next to each other. Putting a man with real attitude and a real point of view, opposite an audience member who’s generally fairly neutral.” We are walking up Arthur’s Seat on a beautiful Edinburgh day, two mornings after the night in question. In reality, Riches is mild, friendly and far more softly-spoken than the bellowing warlords, tattoo artists and survivalists that he plays on stage. Sweetly, he dispels any lingering embarrassment about our simulated sexual antics, with high praise for my performance: “Oh, don’t worry. You were perfect.”

The joy that Riches takes from the uncertain art of audience interaction is immediately clear. “They don’t come up onstage with a huge swell of what their personalities are,” he says fondly, but “with a sort of meekness and hesitancy. So I love the idea of: I’ve got a box of chocolates here, and someone’s thrown away the instructions. I don’t know if this is a hard-centred guy or a soft-centred guy that I’ve got.”

Riches normally presents them with a hard-centred guy. Perhaps the best example of this is Victor Legit, a surveillance officer who he played for the first time in 2007 and who he has returned to at most of his Fringe performances since.

“The great thing about playing Victor is that he is absolutely overwhelming to an audience member,” says Riches of the brash, muscle-bound, Yakult-swilling alpha male who has become his signature character. “They’re very clear about the type of guy that they’re meeting. There’s no sense of ‘Where’s this going to go?’ It’s just like, ‘He’s the alpha, he’s challenging me. Where am I? Am I an alpha? Am I a beta?’”

Sometimes, this sort of challenge proves too much. “I found it increasingly difficult to maintain a joy in the room,” Riches says, explaining why he dropped the character for one year in 2011. “Because a lot of guys just found it very difficult to let themselves be dominated.” On one occasion, an audience member took such exception to a routine in which a young volunteer is persuaded to lick Victor’s face, that he got up, “grabbed me and pushed me back, and said ‘I’m sick and tired of all your gay shit.’”

The irony is that Victor is not gay. “It’s all about the celebration of form and physique for him,” Riches explains, talking of part of the current show in which a young man is persuaded to get even closer to Victor, who is by this time half-naked. “He would be mortified if anybody ever said there was anything sexual going on in that. Because it’s a celebration. It’s Roman. It’s like: ‘Hey, guys: this is how we should be.’”

We pause for a photo shoot atop one of Arthur’s Seat’s smaller mounds. Riches strikes a manly pose, and as he does so, another man appears at the very highest peak about a half-mile away. The stranger has his top off, his body braced to the wind. He bellows: “Raaaaaaargh!”

Riches is good-humoured about being so roundly and appropriately out-manned. Is he himself an alpha, or a beta?

“I think I’m a little bit of both. I’m the fourth brother in a gang of five, so I didn’t really have too many soldiers to lead,” he laughs. “Certainly when I was younger, there was a lot of military influence. My brother was in the police, and my dad was a manager so there was a lot of authority there. I went to a private school until I was thirteen. So there was a lot of authority there to observe, and lampoon, and ridicule.”

In particular, it is that curious sense of entitlement held by true alpha males that Riches wants to probe. “I love the idea of someone saying: ‘I don’t need you to show me how much you admire me; I’m telling you how much you admire me.’ I love those kinds of attitudes. They’re always fun to prick.”

It’s not lost on Riches that men can be at their most macho when at their most insecure. We discuss a hardnut in the audience on Thursday who, rather than engaging with the mute, shy version of Ryan Gosling that Riches was then playing, simply eyeballed him angrily for many long, tension-raising seconds. “It does always fascinate me, when a guy wants to challenge a fictional character,” he laughs. “If that is something that you feel you need to spray your scent over to mark your territory… well, alright man!”

If there is a hint of contempt here for this particularly extreme form of machismo, Riches’ shows are far more about celebration than ridicule. “It’s utterly ridiculous, this whole kind of posturing. It’s fantastic, and it gives us so much joy in terms of laughing at it, and also getting excited by it, like you do in a film.” He talks of his love of media figures like Sean Bean, Daniel Day Lewis and Pierce Brosnan, all of whom have been sent up affectionately in his shows.

And it’s affection, too, that drives his audience interaction. “I would hate to feel that anyone that I ever used and did stuff with in the audience felt bullied or threatened in any way,” he says sincerely. “There should be some reticence and hesitation at first,” he says, but ultimately he wants the audience members that he pulls up to triumph, as much as himself.

“It should be awkward at the beginning, like any relationship,” he smiles. I think back to the uncomfortable, yet oddly empowering act I entered into with him the night before last. “We’re treading on each other’s toes, we’re overriding each other’s sentences,” he continues. “But then by the end, we’re completely in sync. We’ve created this piece together. That’s the ideal.”