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BACKSTORY: Brothers Ben and Max Ringham transitioned from recording drum ’n’ bass tracks to creating theatrical sound design that aims to subvert audiences’ expectations
FROM: London, England
YOU MIGHT KNOW THEM FROM: Various ’90s breakbeat releases on the React label; the avant-pop band Superthriller, which supported Beck on his 2005 European tour; the myriad plays they’ve worked on; or their BBC radio play, Exemplar
NOW: Designing sound and composing music for Waiting for Godot on Broadway, co-starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter
Forget sibling rivalry, British audio gurus Ben and Max Ringham have sibling synergy. But they’ve still had to deal with the fact that, despite being four years apart in age, some people in their workspace were blending them together. It got to the point where theater directors didn’t know who to talk to.
The solution? A remote working situation. The brothers design sound for plays together, but typically one takes the lead on a given project while enlisting guidance from the other, wherever they may be. Currently, Max is overseeing The Bacchae in London, and Ben is working on Broadway with Bill & Ted stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter in a new production of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedy Waiting for Godot. They Zoom, text, and email to assist each other. “The running joke I have is that no one believes that Max exists, and no one believes [him] that I exist,” says Ben.
The Ringhams hail from an artistic family. Their father John was an actor and their mother Felicitas was a French linguist who wrote books on semiotics. Their older sister Jessica is a wig mistress for stage and film, and their other sister Hannah is an actor who co-founded the theater company Shunt, where the brothers got their theater start in 1999 after their dream of superstar DJ fame didn’t quite materialize. (Another fun connection: Their brother-in-law is Tony “Demolition Man” Dolan, bassist/frontman for Venom Inc., one of two versions of the famed heavy metal band Venom that tour to this day.) Ben and Max began making drum ’n’ bass music in the mid-1990s, releasing records as Conspiracy, Narcosis, and Highly Skilled, among other names. Four years after joining Shunt, the duo co-founded a band called Superthriller that blended retro funk and rock influences meshed with EDM sounds.
Keanu Reeves as ‘Estragon’ and Alex Winter as ‘Vladimir’ at Waiting for Godot rehearsal
“I’m really interested in the human voice and the human body as an instrument, and how that conveys the feeling of the text that’s spoken. I feel like the dynamics of someone’s delivery is as musical as you can get.”
Alex Winter as ‘Vladimir’ rehearsing with a hat.
Brandon J. Dirden as ‘Pozzo,’ Michael Patrick Thornton as ‘Lucky’ and Alex Winter as ‘Vladimir’
Ben and Max have different tastes and influences. The former loves Prince, Stevie Wonder, jazz, and funk, and he says Max enjoys the late Talk Talk frontman Mark Hollis and his musical adventures. The siblings’ musical sensibilities impact their sound design work in different ways. For the UK productions Anna and Blindness, they captured binaural sound from the actors and fed it to audience headsets to immerse them in the characters’ POV. For the Broadway production of Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, they blended electronic music sounds with rain. And as with their work on the most recent Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, the Ringhams have the actors on Godot so close-miked that the audience can even hear nuances in their breathing.
“Whenever we start a project, I’m really interested in the human voice and the human body as an instrument, and how that conveys the feeling of the text that’s spoken,” says Ben. “I feel like the dynamics of someone’s delivery is as musical as you can get, and it’s a choice whether you hear that as music or not. But certainly in Godot, the way that Alex, Keanu, Brandon [J. Dirden], and Michael [Patrick Thornton] deliver, it’s this beautiful, melodic sound—not just the tone of their voice, but also the whispers and the sounds of their clothing. That’s what I love. That’s what I’m interested in, and that’s what we’re aiming for with this.”
“The gift of being able to be in a rehearsal room and hear practitioners talk about the work in that way is an astonishing thing, and all of it influences entirely what I do.”
The Ringhams also composed music for Godot. The pre-show composition, a minute-long lead-in, “is quite organic-sounding, pizzicato strings and real instruments,” Ben explains. “Then the intermission is much more digital. It doesn’t sound particularly modern, it sounds like it’s of a different time to the pre-show. But it’s the same chord progressions and the same arpeggiators.” The two different sections reflect the decades-long stretch of time that the two main characters have known each other. The post-show music offers a longer version of the intro. “It’s a very human show,” says Ben. “That’s a really honest way of putting it. It’s not about technology.”
The brothers Ringham are also currently working on the third season of their own BBC radio play, Exemplar, about a forensic audiologist. That show holds special meaning for Ben; he says he is “badly dyslexic” and recalls being told at age 15 that “I would never achieve any sort of high mark in English. So to have written scripts that are read on the BBC is a bit of a fuck-you. We’ll have 15 episodes by the end of this current run, which is exciting.” Other recent Ringham projects include the Gorillaz multisensory 25th anniversary “House of Kong” art exhibition in London and an augmented reality project with a French company called Tin Drum.
A two-time Tony Award nominee with his brother, Ben feels blessed to work in theater. “The gift of being able to be in a rehearsal room and hear practitioners talk about the work in that way is an astonishing thing, and all of it influences entirely what I do,” he says enthusiastically. “All of the conversations, the choices of even the accent that the actor might choose, can influence what you do—musically or sonically, with sound design, all of those things. I feel very grateful for that.” FL
