Time genitals, please

Simon Morley and David Friend play with their genitalia in public. They mould their malleables into shapes and people pay to watch them do it.

They call it genital origami. It's art, they say. "It's very juvenile art," Morley admits, "but it is art. Andy Warhol would stick up for us there." Among their "installations" are the mollusc, the skateboard and the hamburger. They do a bow tie, an umbilical chord and a G-string. The cocktail is especially popular at hen nights (don't ask).

Their two-hander - strictly speaking, a four-hander - was the must-see ticket of the Edinburgh Fringe, and hungry producers have rushed the show down to London. Puppetry of the Penis will open at the Whitehall Theatre. Even as we speak, an entire cemetery of Lord Chamberlains is spinning at approximately 2,000rpm.

So, after all that slavering over Jerry Hall and Nicole Kidman, this pair will strike a blow for male nudity in the West End. Except there is no slavering. Genital origami is a strictly flaccid art-form, not so much asexual as pre-sexual. It would not work with wood. "You get a tingle now and then," confides Friend, "but nothing ever comes of it." "Find me someone who can get an erection onstage with a couple of hundred people laughing at his penis," adds Morley.

They hail, with a certain inevitability, from Australia. "Where you get that classic Australian mateship," says Morley, "and there's a few drinks involved, you'll usually find there's someone dropping his pants and making his friends laugh by constructing different installations." Though they are both in their early 30s, in many ways they are marooned in that innocent window of time when the nappy comes off for good and a boy finds out what he's got down there.

Obviously they're quite big boys now. The publicist thinks their detumescence may amount, in both cases, to an immodest eight inches. "Oh absolutely not," says Friend. "But he is." He nods at Morley, who says, "I wouldn't have a clue. Our producer has been chasing us around with a tape measure going, 'We need to know.' I must admit I won't let one near it. It's not very important."

"You've measured it, mate," says his mate.

Their first meeting was a false start. Morley, from Melbourne, was passing through Friend's hometown, Byron Bay, in northern New South Wales. Friend was alerted that a fellow traveller was doing origami in the gents and sought him out. "I was literally sitting in the beer garden having a quiet meal," recalls Morley, "when this gentleman came up to me and said, 'I believe you do dick tricks.' 'Maybe, Who are you?' Then he proceeded to drop his pants and show us his wares." They didn't meet again for four years.

They teamed up in Melbourne when Morley mounted a pub show to flog off some puppetry calendars, vintage 1997, that hadn't sold well. "They date quickly," says Friend. They took the Melbourne Comedy Festival by storm, then toured Australia. They went down particularly well in the north, but have also done a sell-out season in Sydney. They were turned down by the Mardi Gras gay and lesbian festival. Not gay enough, apparently. "We actually marketed the show in the early days for the gay market but we just couldn't get it at all," says Morley. "We find there is no demographic whatsoever. We get a complete cross section of the community." They have a cult following among grandmothers.

The only area in which they can count on no support is their own parents. Only Friend's mother has been to see the show. "She thought it was funny but - this is her words - she just wishes it was someone else's son. There's nothing you can say." Morley's mother is flying to London for the West-End opening. She is divorced from Morley's father, a born-again Catholic who "... is actually touring the south Pacific with a statue of the Virgin Mary. He has a fascination with Marian apparitions". Friend's father was a major in the army. "He just doesn't want to see it. Not interested. 'Thirty year old. Can do whatever he likes.' He stirs my mother about it. 'Look what your son's doing today!'"

Friend has a supportive girl-friend who is "quite well known for encouraging people to come out and look at her boyfriend naked". Morley was in a three-year relationship which "teetered off for one reason or another.