Forget what you think you know about theatre; Clerke & Joy are about to re-write the rulebook with their first London performance of their show Volcano, all about “eruption and tension and release and geology and human beings and a pilot and the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody”.

Volcano first premiered at The Basement as part of Brighton Festival and for just two nights Rachael Clerke and Josephine Joy will be performing again at new Shoreditch venue The Ditch.

Run Riot's Emily Shipp caught up with Rachael to delve into their mysterious world.

Emily Shipp: Volcano seems to pack a lot into a small space, tell us more about it...

Rachael Clerke: My family went on holiday to Iceland and I'm notoriously difficult to buy presents for. They went to Eyjafjallajökull and my Dad scooped up a load of ash and brought that back for me. So I ended up phoning Jojo and saying, “I think we should make a show with some ash in it”. She was sitting on a train in London and there was a bloke opposite her in a business suit listening to music and trying not to cry. The headphones were up really loud and he was listening to this really epic love ballad. Jojo could hear it and he was sitting there welling up. So the show sort of came out of these two stories.

ES: So a collision of an emotional man on the train and volcanic ash?

RC: Yeah! So we ended up building this story about this pilot who's grounded during the ash cloud and he needs to find a way to erupt; the idea is he's erupting in parallel with the volcano. He's stuck in Reykjavik airport and he becomes obsessed with The Righteous Brother's “Unchained Melody”. He decides that the only way he's going to find his release is by going to a karaoke bar and singing this. So that's kind of how it all came about.

ES: That's quite an ingenious story. Your other productions are equally inventive, including Isabella the dead old woman, and the Gogglettes. Tell me more about that one...

RC: The Gogglettes came about because we wanted to perform at this cabaret night but we didn't have anything! So we went to the costume cupboard to see what we could find. We ended up with these ridiculous swimming costumes, did a photo shoot with a couple of our friends who were on the fine art course and then built something around that. We work quite a lot from images or little things we find, like the story of the guy on the train, or taking this bunch of photos and then taking them back to the studio and seeing what they suggested. So that was a bit of a backwards process; we did the promo images first and made an act around that. It's very silly; and very black. The idea is that it's the Hemel Hempstead under 16s synchronised swimming club, they've just been at the funeral of their swimming coach and they turn up at the bar. We've done it at quite a few bars and festivals and the ideas is that they turn up in this half night-out, half synchronised swimming gear and perform highlights from the funeral on the stage.

ES: … in the style of synchronised swimming?

RC: There're a few dances with some synchronised moves. We also do this eulogy which is taken from a tutorial called “How to write a eulogy for a stranger” which we found online. It came up when we were writing “Isabella” because we were looking at death a lot and the idea of no-one knowing you. So the Gogglettes followed on from that.

ES: Sounds like quite a lot of your work is about ideas colliding in unexpected ways... What are your inspirations?

RC: That's a hard question! I think really we're far more inspired by pop culture and films and music and a lot of stuff that you find on the internet. We spend a lot of time in rehearsals trawling YouTube videos. It's something that we were always taught you shouldn't do! I guess stylistically we learnt a lot about experimental theatre companies like Forced Entertainment or Goat Island, so a lot of the work we create comes from that. Jojo's got much more of a dance background so she's much more influenced by DV8 and stuff like that. I'm really into the New York experimental theatre like The Team and the Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service and we sort of lift things from lots of different places.

ES: One of your critics has described you as “bending the rules to suit your own purposes” - do you think that represents what you do?

RC: I think it does. I guess by pulling a lot of stuff from the public realm we're quite open to finding the ways that we can make things happen and we're keen not to be restricted to just making theatre. It's really important to us not to be just the “Clerke & Joy Theatre Company”. But we made a website fanclub and we’re working on a performance lecture and we're keen to just find the ways to say what we want to say. We like to play with different mediums and different ways of achieving things.

ES: Of all the things you've worked on, what's been most fun to date?

RC: It's hard to speak for both of us, but I love performing. On Wednesday we performed Volcano for the first time since May and it's just so exciting to be performing in front of an audience. The Rafiki band project, where we ended up making this strange fanclub, that's a lot of fun too. When we're writing our Arts Council application or something, we'll always just do two hours Arts Council application, and one hour making a music video for Rafiki band, or something like that. That's our 'totally silly; just do it for fun' thing.

ES: You're about to perform Volcano at The Ditch at Shoreditch Town Hall. Of all the places, if anywhere was possible, where would you most like to perform?

RC: We really want to perform in the theatre space in Shoreditch Town Hall – the Assembly Hall, which is a massive space, and we've got a lot of big dreams for a show that we want to make up there. I think that's the big one. And we want to perform internationally as much as possible as well. We're performing Volcano in France at the start of December and we're pretty excited about the idea of travel and the thought of seeing as many different places as possible.

ES: When you said the Assembly Hall in Shoreditch Town hall would you effectively just be moving upstairs?

RC: Yeah! But for Volcano The Ditch is perfect. For the Assembly Hall we've got this idea for a show which follows on from “Isabella” which is a really early show we did together and it's all about decay and it would have a big cast and an orchestra on the stage. We've been thinking big. It's very tempting as a young graduate company to do work that's very clean and fits in a suitcase and two people on stage with a microphone and nothing else, which is great and I love seeing work like that, but we get quite excited about making things that are a bit bigger.

ES: And finally, what's next for Clerke and Joy?

RC: We're doing these gigs for Volcano now and we're also touring that in the spring. We're going to India for three weeks in December which is really exciting; we've been invited by a festival to lead a workshop for artists under 25 and we’re doing a residency there. Then we're also developing this performance lecture which is called “Clerke and Joy Tips for the Real World” which is about surviving after you graduate. It's very silly but we think it's quite useful and we're looking for partners to develop that and tour it round Universities. It's sort of a list of things we wish we'd been told before we graduated. It's got music and stories, it's got a dance routine in it and we get our boobs out!

The London Premier of Clerke & Joy’s Volcano will be at The Ditch at Shoreditch Town Hall on Thursday 7th and Friday 8th November. Get your tickets here.