'Ello, Guvnor

My voice is far too loud for Richie Hart. It's nighttime here and I'm trying to be exuberant. It's Monday morning in London and Hart's a softly spoken, polite, classically trained musician. I feel like I've perpetuated all the classic Australian drongo stereotypes. He insists that it's okay, he's heading to the National Theatre to sort some stuff out and needs to wake up anyway. What a lege'.

Hart is the music director and bass player for the onstage skiffle band on the Oceania tour of the hit variety-farce theatre show, One Man, Two Guvnors, a take on Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, which opens at the STC this month. It's a frenetic, hilarious show and no one stays put for long.

“It's basically a classic Commedia dell'Arte farce that's been updated to the modern era,” Hart says, “but it's set in 1963 in Brighton. It has all the usual farce elements you might expect, but it's also like a variety show where in between acts you might have, I don't know, maybe someone's doing the splits and playing the guitar, or a guy playing the xylophone.”

I get the impression Hart isn't doing a lot of the musical acrobatics. He and his onstage band The Craze do do skiffle though.

Skiffle is the toe-tapping, light-hearted 1950s music genre that can be thrown together with a guitar, a stand-up bass and your little cousin playing snare with metal brushes. Hart's band warm the crowd, play in interval and between scenes. “We'll rush the guys on, play a song, then rush off again. And that's what it's meant to be – it's quite in and out.”

“When Nick Hytner [the director] put the show together,” Hart continues, “he told Grant [Olding], the composer, he wanted it to feel like the local skiffle band had been asked to play at a variety performance, to play songs of the era. We're not actually playing songs from the era, but we're playing songs that sound like they are.”

It's a roustabout style that the Londoner was initially unfamiliar with. “My musical upbringing was quite strict, quite classical. I didn't really experience that kind of musical variety until much later. I'm only 28 so I wasn't alive [when skiffle was booming], and it was quite low brow and low-fi,” Hart says. “But it was quite an important genre because, as I am aware now, it was the precursor to rock'n'roll, and a lot of the stuff that we're playing is inspired by musicians like Jimmy Page, Mick Jagger, The Beatles, the Hollies. They all did skiffle first, then went to rock later.”

These kinds of variety shows, where everyone does a bit of everything, seem to be trending. The Broadway show Once which won the 2012 Tony Award for Best Musical is pretty similar in its casual tone and focus on integrating music, albeit Irish pub music. “It's not a new thing, but it's a new thing at the same time. It is unusual, definitely. I think it's inevitable when actors and musicians get more broad in their ability. But maybe that's always been the case.”

He's quick to clarify, though, with that typically guarded irony of the old country, that One Man, Two Guvnors has no relation to Irish pub music. “Our music is very British, we kind of just stand there and play. It's nice, I enjoy it.”