What Ruby Wax’s daughters did next
In spite of their pedigree, Maddy and Marina, daughters of Ruby Wax, tell Eleanor Steafel that comedy was never part of their plan
At the end of Ruby Wax’s onewoman show – in which the comic spends 90 minutes candidly detailing some of her most difficult memories from a lifelong battle with mental illness – something usually happens. When she opens the floor to questions, an audience member will pipe up and ask, with more than a hint of judgment: “How have your children been affected by your depression?”
Helpfully, Max, Maddy and Marina, Wax’s three grown-up children, are often on hand.
“I stand up and I’m like ‘I’m just fine!’,” says Marina, feigning a lisp and letting her left eye droop and flutter like a manic ventriloquist’s doll.
“I once ducked and my friend who was sitting next to me waved and pretended to be my mum’s daughter for the rest of the night,” says Maddy.
You can understand the pair’s instinctive comic response to Wax’s description live on stage in front of thousands of strangers of the major breakdown she once had at a school sports day. Humour is in the genes twice over – their father is comedy director Ed Bye, who worked on every Nineties classic from French
and Saunders, to Bottom and Absolutely Fabulous.
“It helps that mental health has never been taboo in our family,” says Maddy. “We talk about mental health like we talk about what we’re going to have for dinner.” And family dinners were never quiet. “We would be destroying each other with comedy, so we had to be quite witty from the start,” adds Marina.
After just a few minutes in their company (Maddy is 27, and the spitting image of her mother; Marina, 24, is taller, blonder and with the look of Bye), it’s clear they have funny bones. Chatting over avocado on toast in their local café on Golborne Road (once a proper old fashioned “caff ”, now Notting Hill-ified, with assorted nut milks), the pair riff off each other, shaking with laughter when one says something the other deems embarrassing.
They have been playing for laughs since they were children. “The shift was when we realised we could do it in front of strangers,” says Maddy, who launched their career as a double act two years ago, when she surprised her sister by bundling her onto an open mic slot at the Fringe.
“Marina was grey. She looked like she’d died. We didn’t know whether anyone would understand but it was so exciting when the audience would laugh at things we found funny. We were like, ‘Oh my God, amazing, this isn’t just for our excited parents’.”
Next week their sketch show, Siblings, opens in Edinburgh – the sisters’ second summer at the Fringe after earning rave reviews last year. Despite their pedigree, Maddy and Marina insist this was never part of the plan. After university, Maddy went into PR, only to discover her bosses had worked with the publicist Lynne Franks – the inspiration behind Edina in Ab Fab, for which their mother was the script editor. And it’s thanks to her godfather, Alan Rickman, who “thought I was quite funny”, that she began to entertain the idea that comedy was something she might do for a living. “It was totally my godfather’s fault,” she says. “He took me to the theatre and was like: ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ I said ‘well I’m working in PR but I came across this clown school thing in Paris, but I’ll probably never go’. He got this table of all his friends, all people that I am just in awe of, to go: ‘Do it, do it, do it’. Then they all told me about their regrets in life… the next week I quit my job.” Rickman supported her, visiting her at the École Philippe Gaulier in Paris. It’s clear she misses him terribly. “Even getting on the train to Paris I called him and he was like: ‘Get on the train, go, do it’.” Marina earned her stripes at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. “A lot of the time, I’ll be doing what I deem as ‘Class-a Shakespeare’ that you pay a lot for and everyone should be incredibly grateful for,” she says, tongue in cheek, “then Maddy comes and does some flailing and clowny stuff and gets a round of applause.”
“It’s not flailing, Marina, it’s art,” she shoots back, deadpan.
Their double act works, they say, because they are in sync and not competitive with each other. “We’re one unit and we want the audience to have a good time,” says Marina.
The sisters live in a flat near their parents in Notting Hill – “that’s as far as they’d let us go,” says Maddy, who still does freelance PR work to keep afloat. “I have a real job,” she says.
“And I run around with canapés,” says Marina, who waitresses and works in a school.
Their childhood sounds like a riot, consisting of each battling to out-funny the other. “We did a lot of Australian characters in the backs of cars when we were young,” Marina tells me.
“We’d drive around America to weird towns because that was what Mum wanted to do. We’d pull over at some old brothel and she’d be like ‘OK guys, let’s go’ [she has her mum’s Illinois accent down to a T], and she’d be off interviewing the museum guide.
“We’d have 17-hour car journeys so you’d go slightly insane, and then you’d see a shack and you’d go ‘who lives in there?’ and then we’d be performing ‘Shackety Shack’ for the next hour.” Maddy cringes: “My mum would have the camera and Dad would be quietly laughing and trying to drive. I think we
‘It doesn’t feel we’ve had a kind of leg-up. You have got to want to do it’
just always had the camera on us.” Now they write jokes they think Max, their older brother, would find funny. And they shrug off any suggestion that their well-connected parents had a hand in their careers.
“It doesn’t feel like we’ve had any kind of leg-up,” says Marina. “We can get a bit ‘it’s our thing’, but over time we’ve realised actually their suggestions are good. Some of the things Dad suggests are really funny. But you have to want to do it yourself. An audience can smell it on you.” They are terribly proud of their parents; particularly of Wax’s openness on stage about mental illness. Has it ever been hard to watch?
“The first time was quite difficult,” says Marina. “I remember Dad wanting to sit by us because she honours depression, she doesn’t sugarcoat it. But it would be a shame to be precious about it because it might hinder someone else who is sick. You’ve got to be like: ‘Go, Ma… go do what you’ve got to do.”
“Yeah, we’re not b----- hippies, are we?” her sister pipes up, in a pitchperfect Australian accent.
“Nope, capitalism all the way!” Marina screeches, slapping the table so hard the teacups jump in cartoonish unison.
And just like that, they turn a poignant moment into a scene of pure comedy. But then, they have learnt from the best.
Siblings: Acting Out is at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Underbelly, George Square Aug 1-13 and 15-27 at 6.40pm. Visit: tickets.edfringe.com