Take a chance on me!

It is fun to mislead the audience, to make them think we have gone too far," says Fran Waller Zepper, with a twinkle in her eye.

She's well placed to get her kicks as part of Dutch theatre company De Gebroeders Flint; she and her partner-in-crime Felix Strategier are veterans of the toughest kind of theatre - high-risk acrobatics, street shows and mime. She has worked with top-notch mime groups, including London's The People Show, while he has worked in musical theatre and still plays a mean ocarina.

They appear exactly as you'd expect theatrical old-timers to look: louche, dishevelled and slightly raffish. Fran arrives for the interview in a black velvet trouser suit and a battered cloche hat wound round with brocade and ribbon; Felix has a worn, slightly shiny tuxedo jacket on over his sweater and cords.

They set up De Gebroeders Flint (the name means "the brothers Flint" but there are no brothers Flint) 20 years ago and there has been no shortage of risk-taking since; they giggle as they describe a street auction they held for a statue of the Virgin Mary that ended when they broke a chair over an innocent bystander's head. They only revealed that he was one of the company when the audience was in uproar.

"We always try to break the barrier between the artist and the audience," says Felix. But sometimes the breakage comes dangerously close to being literal; he once played the part of a street drunk so successfully that people started threatening to smash his head in.

In their current show Bingo! they conjure up an old-fashioned bingo palace where the audience compete with real money for real prizes. And even if - like me - your only experience of bingo is playing housey-housey for chocolate coins, you can't help getting competitive.

Bingo! brings out the granny in everyone, and when I watched it in Amsterdam I found myself lining up cards to increase my chances of winning the freakishly kitsch prizes: blow-up breasts, a green inflatable crocodile, a card caddy set and a toy basset hound with the most mournful gaze you ever saw. Felix, oozing oily charm as the Italian impresario Riccardo, was not too proud to trumpet the virtues of the prizes he had tracked down for us to win.

"I have imported from Russia real icons," he said, also pointing out that his yellow shoes were made "from a real plastic snake".

Reality of the more conventional kind is in short supply at Bingo! Their bingo palace is pure absurdism, a hyperreal establishment staffed by a motley crew of charlatans from all over the world.

Felix's Riccardo insists, with more and more desperation, "I am absolutely sure that tonight you are going to become much more happy than you are now", while Fran wears her hair in a fearsome spike ("plenty of talcum powder and water") to play Riccardo's wife, the glacial Anna Feoderovna.