Mat Ricardo has performed around the world in some of the most famous venues. He has even done a show for the king. But the first day he hit the streets as a performer wasn’t his most financially successful.
“There’s a sort of busking that mostly musicians do where you do something as people pass by,” Ricardo says. “So, I did that the first time, just once, and it was in north London, and I thought I’d just do some jumping tricks as people walked by. So, I put my hat down and I thought, well, you put a few coins in the hat just to start things off. So, I put a few coins in the hat, put it down, turned around and the hat immediately got stolen. So, my first ever show, I made a negative amount of money, and yet I thought to myself, I’ll stick with this. This is clearly a good idea.”
Ricardo, known as The Extraordinary Gentleman, is a world-renowned performer who has a wide breadth of talent in street performance, live theater, cabaret, and even podcasting, writing, and speaking. He has been lauded by The Scotsman as “undoubtedly one of the greatest variety artists working today.”
A Holiday Surprise
But his journey to success as a live performer began by chance on a family vacation.
“I was on holiday with my parents at a seaside resort, and I saw a street performer. I don’t think I’d ever seen a street performer before. He was a juggler, and he wasn’t a particularly technically excellent juggler, but he was a showman. He was charismatic and funny and anarchic, and I couldn’t get over how just by skill and guts and sheer force of will, he transformed a place that was not designed for entertainment – it was just a patch of pavement. He transformed it with his skills into a venue, into a theater, gathered an audience, arranged them, did a show that people watching had not planned to see. And every element of that seemed completely magical to me – the spontaneous nature of it, the freedom that he had as a performer.”
That freedom struck a chord with Ricardo.
“As a kid, I watched this, and it blew my mind. He was there for the whole week, and I went back to every show. By the end, I wanted to be him. The first thing I did when I went home, I went the pet shop at the end of our street, and I bought three rubber dog bowls, got a book from the library on how to juggle, and here I am.”
Building a Persona
Creating his “gentleman” persona didn’t take quite as long as that finale. His moniker is really a throwback to a different time when jugglers and acrobats and magicians were world famous during the heyday of musical and variety acts.
“There were gentlemen jugglers, there were restaurant jugglers, there were track jugglers, there were military jugglers, salon jugglers, strongman jugglers, all these different kinds of jugglers. And quite early on in my career – I am a nerd, so I like to research things – I discovered this idea of the gentleman juggler. It’s a clever thing because juggling is essentially showing off – it’s ‘look what I can do that you can’t.’ And depending on how you present it, that can be not fun.”
“But gentlemen jugglers kind of circumvented that by just being these characters that were just super cool and they wore nice suits and they used to have their stage set like a bar or a club or something, and they would just sort of saunter in and just do tricks with all the things that a gentleman would encounter on a night out. That just appealed to me because I liked that it was all based in character. It was more theatrical. It wasn’t, here is a trick I can do. I was a cool person who could basically do anything.”
And, of course, he got to wear a suit.
“As for the suits, I really liked suits,” Ricardo says. “I feel like back in the day when I was first learning my stuff, the first five years of being a street performer, I kind of liked not dressing in the way that people think street performers usually dress. It’s very hard as a street performer to not be a bit dirty. You’re working on a street, and they’re not clean places. So, I quite liked trying to dress as nicely as I could. I stood out.”
While the suits set him apart on the street, they also boosted his own confidence, as well.
“From that, I just got into the whole kind of culture of menswear suits and stuff. And it’s the clothes now that I feel comfortable in. Also, it’s the kind of clothing that makes me feel confident. It makes me feel like Mat Ricardo. Mat Ricardo is not my real name. It’s the name that I’ve used for my entire adult life, but it’s not the name I was born with. So yeah, having a nice suit makes me feel a little more confident, a little stronger, a little more bulletproof, a little cooler. I still struggle with that.”
Making an impact
One of the things Ricardo loves about performing is how his performance impacts other people, a lesson he learned from the first street performer he saw on that family holiday decades ago. Ricardo never forgot the impression that first street performer made on him, taking his stage name, in part, from that busker.
“He was part of a group called the Fabulous Salami Brothers, so his stage name was Ricardo Salami,” Ricardo says. “My stage name is Ricardo, partly because of that. And about 10 years ago, once the internet kind of properly happened, I thought I should look him up. I should find him and say thanks. I looked him up and, literally, the previous month he’d died, but I got in contact with his family and told them, and they were like, oh, that’s amazing. They loved it.”
Ricardo knows his performances have had a similar impact on other young performers.
“It’s one of the nice things about having done this for so long is that you do get young performers who say they saw your show as a child or they were people that went to drama school and didn’t quite want to be an actor and were looking for an art form to work in and they saw someone like me do a show. Oh, that’s great because it’s all about the freedom of expression you get from street performing. Often someone will come up to me and say, “I saw you at this gig, and now I do it. And that’s nice. We all want that feeling of passing it down the line.”
It’s not just future performers who benefit from Ricardo’s shows. Sometimes audience members just need a little bit of show-biz magic in their lives to help them through a rough day.
At a recent show, a woman bantered with Ricardo throughout the show in a good-natured way.
“She was confident and giggly, but she wasn’t trying to cause any trouble,” Ricardo says. “She was a fun heckler. So, throughout the show I kind of went back and forward with her, and she was kind of fun and it was nice. And then after the show, she came up to me in tears and said, ‘I just want to tell you that I’ve had a really rough week and that thing, talking to you and playing with you in the show, I really needed that.’ And she gave me a big hug – and this is a bit of a cliché, but it’s a show biz magic cliché – but it’s a real thing.
“And it’s all the more powerful when people don’t plan to see a show, the spontaneous nature, you inject someone’s life with something overwhelmingly positive or magical. You distract them from whatever they were doing just for long enough to show them something funny and silly and spectacular. In a world driven now by algorithms, surprises like that don’t really happen much because they’re not profitable. So when something like that can happen, she told me that I completely made her day and I said to her, it’s the same. It works the other way. Hundreds of times I’ve been having a rough time and I’ve had to do a show and I’ve thought to myself, this is going to be hard. I’ve got myself to the venue or the festival, I’ve walked out and then I’ve come off after the show, it’s a weight lifted. It’s an escape for the performer as well as the audience.”
Expect the unexpected
Whether it’s something unexpected that happens at a show or a ringing phone that turns out to be an invitation to perform for the future king, the life of a performer is never dull.
“It’s so weird, this job. You get a phone call, and someone says, so what are you doing on this day? Can you headline a show for Prince Charles and Camilla. It was a party in their palace, a Christmas party for them and their friends and the staff of the palace. It was not a huge audience, it was just in a kind of small ballroom, like 300 people in the audience and a little stage. And you walk on stage and front row of the center, there’s Charles and Camilla. I mean I’ve got very complicated opinions about the idea of royalty, but all that aside, you look at that guy and you go, ‘I’ve known your face since I was born.’
“They were a nice audience. And then afterwards we hung out. It’s such a weird thing to see. We had gin and tonics, and they were delightful.”
Not every surprise is as nice as meeting royalty, but when you’re a juggler, drops happen.
“My feeling is I care more about the performance than the technical tricks, and I think the fun thing about juggling and circus in general is that people know it can go wrong. If I’m juggling and if I drop, that’s disappointing for an audience, but if I pick it up and try it again, people like that, that’s theater.”
Some things, though, you just can’t plan for. Ricardo often does a trick in his show where he pulls a tablecloth off table without disturbing the items on top. Originally, he used a camping table, “a big, cheap, quite fragile wooden table.” As part of his show, he used a diabolo, which is a circus prop that has an axle between two cups that a performer spins around using a string attached to two sticks.
“I threw the diabolo up, I turned around and the string on the diabolo got caught around my ankle. I grabbed the tablecloth, I pulled it, the tablecloth got caught in the string around my ankle. I fell over into the table smashing the table in half and smashing everything on the table. And then the diabolo fell down and hit me in the face. It was brilliant. It was so fantastic. You could not plan that. The greatest slapstick clowns in the world could not have planned that as well as I didn’t plan it. It was so funny, and it got a huge laugh from the audience, and I had no finale, and all my props were smashed. And I just said, well, that’s the show.”
Having the perfect show isn’t the most important thing to Ricardo. Even when he drops, there’s an important story, an important message for both performer and audience.
“You’re telling a story that you’re going to try again because you want to work for the audience, because you want to see it. You are creating an underdog character by doing that. And then if you pick it up, try it again, maybe drop it again one more time, do it that third time and nail it, they will love you more than if it had worked just the first time. One of the reasons I like juggling is because it lends itself to the theater of the character. Doing the trick is more important than the trick.”
