That Adam Lazurus doesn’t know when to quit. And for the record, that’s a good thing.

Having dazzled audiences with the highly successful staging of Fable, a nasty, biting, satire laced production that toured for two years; his follow-up project is called Wonderland. And yes, it stars the comically offensive creature named Eff. The self-professed Garden of Eden native utters bad words galore and specializes in discomfort.

Yet, despite this, Eff strangely still makes an undeniable connection with playgoers.

Lazarus insists there’s an Eff lurking in all of us which, he adds, is all the reason needed to keep the character popping up in new story ideas for years to come.

You rely on an obscure form of clown known as ‘bouffon’ to execute your latest project. How do you describe this art form and what’s needed to achieve success?
It’s sometimes good to describe bouffon in terms of its opposite – the clown. The clown’s job is to come on stage, look the audience in the eyes and make them laugh, as the clown celebrates the beauty of human ridiculousness. The bouffon’s job is to come on stage, look the audience in the eyes and make them laugh, as the bouffon mocks and exposes human hypocrisies.

When I teach bouffon, I go back to Medieval times and ask students to dress up as society’s outcasts, grotesque beings that were born with a scarlet letter embedded in their forehead, those creatures that ‘polite’ and ‘proper’ society deemed unsuitable to live a life of normalcy, so they cast them into the swamps. I ask these beautiful freaks to enter on to the stage and have the pleasure to be nasty and mock those that named them outcast.

It’s complex for a performer to access that part of themselves - to look ugly, to be seen as ugly and yet feel beautiful. There is enormous power in that. Here’s a great Diane Arbus quote that sums up bouffon quite nicely:

Freaks was a thing I photographed a lot...I just used to adore them... they made me feel a mixture of shame and awe. There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.

For bouffon to be successful, it has to be funny. It can be a manipulative act. The Fool gets away with calling King Lear an idiot only because Lear thinks the Fool is a Fool. If he didn’t, the Fool would be killed. It’s the same with a good bouffon performance.

Having said that, you’ve reintroduced a foul-mouthed, legless entity by the name of ‘Eff’ to deliver yet another thrilling theatre experience for audiences. He’s said to be the epitome of desperation, filth, poverty and loneliness in this creation. But he seems to yearn for love, is that a fair assessment?
Eff does yearn for a connection and is very open about his desire for love. He offers you unconditional understanding and whatever your heart desires. He even bakes you cookies.

The real question is: can you love him?

Audiences were first introduced to ‘Eff’ in your previous offering, Fable, in which this character retold the Garden of Eden myth. What inspired this latest project Wonderland and why did you feel the boundaries needed to be expanded?
I have always toyed with a new show for Eff that stripped away the myth of his creation and dealt, instead, with the reality of his status as an outsider.

I was also intrigued by the idea of Eff renting a theatre to tell a story. That he was the master of sound and lights and the technical tools of the theatre. When I started to explore this idea, new questions arose: Why are we in the theatre? What do we expect from performers, audiences, the story itself? These questions are a great place to work from and offer endless possibilities.

Does ‘Eff’ have a back story to explain his behaviour?
Eff remains in the realm of mystery. He is born from the darkness in us and the aspects of ourselves that we hide from the world. Aspects like hatred, jealousy, hurt. Funny thing is, those parts have a nasty way of coming back to the world to say hello. And we all see them.

Eff likes to laugh at those parts.

What do you feel audiences are captivated by this grotesque figure?
People are always fascinated by the outsider. Like the Arbus photographs, or the circus sideshow, or Heidi Montag. We love to pay our price of admission and stare at what is ‘other’. We’d never invite them home for dinner, but we’ll poke and prod at them from a distance.

There’s also a bit of schadenfreude and masochism in there. People seem to like being made fun of. Eff offers that catharsis to audiences. He says in public what we say behind closed doors. He is fearless.

Through his laughably crass form of communication, ‘Eff’ has a lot to say on such subjects such as relationships, cookie recipes, and The Beatles. Is there a turning point for Eff in this story or does he accept he’s condemned for eternity?
Eff always accepts who he is and his fate of destitution and isolation. That being said, he sometimes gets his hopes up that someone in the audience will love him enough to save him.

Innovative types such as yourself routinely have follow-up stories on the mental radar screen before a current offering is even unveiled. Does Adam Lazarus have ‘Eff’s’ next story mapped out in his head upon the conclusion of Wonderland?
Oh yeah. I’ve got dozens of plays waiting for Eff to star in. There’s Zen and Art of Motorcyle Maintenance: A Bouffon Musical; Your Pope, My Pope, Whose Pope?: A Bouffon Musical; The Godfather: A Bouffon Musical; and of course, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: A one man Bouffon-Dinner Party-Musical