Coming soon to Queanbeyan, where the humble shopping trolley has been deified in song, is a show inspired by an equally iconic object – the wheelie bin.

Describing the globally-loved bin as their “transformational muse”, three circus comedians – Jamie Bretman, Jack Coleman and Morgan Wilson, all graduates of Melbourne’s National Institute for Circus Arts – transform rubbish bins to become cars, trenches, charity rocket ships even musical instruments. 

When I catch up with Bretman, co-founder of the team Trash Test Dummies, I find the word “circus” doesn’t quite cover it.

It’s more a physical theatre piece than pure circus, accounting for sell-out hit seasons at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was runner-up in the Children’s Choice Award for 2016. It’s also travelled to 15 countries, easily comprehensible because it doesn’t involve language. 

“It’s essentially for kids and their families, even their grandparents, although occasionally the 16-year-olds in the audience are too cool for school,” Bretman says, “So we work hard to keep our jokes up-to-date and evolving.” 

That could involve trawling the hot topics of the moment and knowing what the youthful buzzwords are to keep the show as fresh as possible. As with the pantomime of yesteryear, there may also be a bit of double entendre for the grownups. 

The entire show is performed in work overalls with no glitzy circus costumes and they’ll be wearing crash hats – “But not all the time, you’ll have to come to see the show to see why,” he says.

Bretman says he has more of a theatre background than the other two, but that co-founder Coleman is more acrobatic, flipping, jumping and doing handstands, while American circus artist Wilson, who came to NICA as a fee-paying international student and stayed on, is more into balancing and juggling.

“We’re all complementary,” Bretman says. “We learn tricks from each other… Jack does handstands on our heads. I tend to fall over a lot.”

In their final year at NICA in 2012, assisted by the late circus director Derek Ives, they spent three months working up a kind of cabaret show based around graffiti and found all sorts of surprising things about wheelie bins that he doesn’t want to tell me.

“We were the evil wheelie bins chasing the great graffiti artist around – we were evil characters. We launched it in Melbourne during 2013… we’ve done 1000 shows now, and continue to be hired. 

“Our circus is not conventional circus… It’s highly interactive, we involve the audience without getting them on stage, and it is narrative-driven.

“But we’re not evil anymore. Bins can be evil if you chase people around with them, but if you put kids in the bins and give them a ride, that’s different – our bins are very clean.

“Every country and every culture has wheelie bins – they may have different dimensions and different colours, but the principle is the same – you wheel them in and out… we know far too much about bins, like how to ride them like a skateboard.

“That’s why this show is about rubbish.” 

Trash Test Dummies, The Q, Queanbeyan, April 12-13.