A double act that is making the most of minimalist theatre

Have you ever wondered what happened to the comedy double act? Readers of a certain age will remember a time when Saturday night TV was crammed with them – Cannon and Ball, Little and Large, the Two Ronnies.

They all came from a tradition of variety entertainment that is now pretty much extinct. But the variety double act tradition is now being revived in deadpan guise by two young theatre makers from Chicago, Tyler Myers and Stephen Fiehn, whose new show, Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me, appears at the Leeds University's Workshop Theatre next week.

The title is inspired by Laurel and Hardy's 1937 film, Way Out West, and the show also draws on the work of Morecambe and Wise.

Myers and Fiehn call themselves Cupola Bobber after a type of fishing float – a "bobber" – and it says a lot about how the pair operate. Their performances are like little temporary structures that float, or bob, between theatre venues – and even across the Atlantic.

By staying small and lightweight, they're well suited to survive in the increasingly stormy seas of today's arts world. At a time when many theatres, large and small, are running scared from the swingeing cuts to Arts Council funding announced in the Chancellor's spending review, Myers and Fiehn are touring without the added costs of sets or even supporting technicians.

Instead, like the variety performers of yesterday, they're literally travelling with what they can fit in a suitcase. Their staging for Way Out West consists of a few pieces of tarpaulin, which are easily folded, but can be magically transformed into do-it-yourself versions of mountains, clouds, and oceans. These become the "backdrop" for the duo's playful reflections on our relationship with land and sea.

More on that in a moment, but it's worth pausing to consider that this is the second touring show without a set that Workshop Theatre has hosted this month.

Tim Crouch's award-winning play, The Author, has also just visited, a piece which doesn't even use a stage. It simply has two banks of audience sitting looking at each other, with four actors sitting among them. As with Cupola Bobber, the result is innovative, memorable theatre, but theatre that can be moved with ease and a minimum of expense.

Frankly, that's how Workshop Theatre can afford to host such work. We have only a minimal operating budget, since university finances too are very tight in the current climate.

Much the same applies to our sister Leeds University venue, stage@leeds, and to our colleagues at Leeds Metropolitan University's Studio Theatre (newly rehoused at the new Northern Ballet Theatre complex). But in this city, it's the relatively small scale and flexibility of these university venues that allow us to bring in challenging and original work.

Major theatres are vital to the cultural life of the city, and they're worth every penny spent on them by the public purse. It's been proven by research that for every 1 invested in the arts by the UK government, 2 comes back to it in revenues from the resulting economic activity.

But while some of us agitate about the ground being pulled out from under us, Cupola Bobber make theatre about it. Way Out West is inspired in part by the story of the Suffolk town of Dunwich, where coastal erosion has meant that year on year, bits of the town just fall into the sea. Bit by bit, the townspeople rebuild on solid ground to the West. Dunwich is on the move.

The story reminded Myers and Fiehn of the old American exhortation to "go West, young man". It's a quirky, lateral leap, of course, to go from the English seaside to the American pioneer territories. But, then again, as the poet Gertrude Stein once asked of the Midwestern landscape that Myers and Fiehn hail from, "is there any difference between flat land and an ocean?"

Both can stretch out for thousands of miles in all directions, vast and seemingly inhospitable, but people still make their homes on them. The trick is in learning to survive.

Professor Stephen Bottoms is director of the Workshop Theatre at Leeds University. Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me plays at the venue on November 17 and 18 at 8pm. For tickets, call 0113 343 8730.

sea and land: Way Out West the Sea Whispered Me by Cupola Bobber at the Workshop Theatre at Leeds University.

stephen bottoms: Praise for flexibility of university venues.