Interviewing the Barabbas clown trio - Veronica Coburn, Raymond Keane and Mikel Murfi - can be like yapping to a very earnest Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Tweedleydoo. They tend to nod seriously at each other's pronouncements, finish and fill out each other's sentences (even if taking wildly different directions); generally projecting an unshakeably united front, like democracy gone - literally, in their case - bananas.

Raymond: "Because we've gotten so used to the comfort of the threesome, even when one of us has an idea or an answer to something, we still bounce it around just to be sure. As a result, sometimes decisions can take a wee bit longer - "

Veronica: "- but they're a better decision in the end - "

Mikel: "- that's what we think, anyway."

Long before they set up Barabbas in 1994, they had worked together, in various combinations, on TV shows such as Gerry Stembridge's Nothing To It, or fringe companies such as CoPoL, crossinfecting each other's ideas and performance styles: Mikel's natural comic gift, later honed by the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris (from where he has a "Pedagogical degree"), Raymond's personable brand of street mime and tick-ridden clowning, and Veronica's bizarrely sympathetic and forlorn creature-comedy.

In Barabbas, they united behind the mask-like icon of the red nose, and over eight stage shows (and their regular TnaG late-night snippets) have forged a peculiarly homey identity in surrealism, French bouffon clown tropes and rural Irish caricatures. Much of their material comes completely from left-field, but when they hit home, they are riotously funny.

When I met them last week, things were a bit chaotic as they settled into the Project @ the Mint venue, a week ahead of the first performance of their new show, Hupnouse. Lighting people and other bods were picking their way through the huge junkyard set, designed by artist Laurent Mellett, a soldered elange mixture of trees made of exhaust pipes, toilet-bowls, bedsprings, bicycle wheels and "radioactive" pools.

Raymond, who's directing this one, was nervily quiet, talking me through some of the bizarre, rather outre sightgags. Veronica, often the serious one in conversation, gave the odd, wet little sneeze (she had the flu). She was decked out in tattered fortycoats attire (as we talked, a costume person thoughtfully came up and gave one of her layers a big rip for good measure). Meanwhile, the lantern-jawed Mikel, sporting an outlandish hairstyle you could cut with a shears, talked his usual motormouthful of reasonable madness, the throwaway lumpen, rustic caricatures creeping through his most level-headed conversation.

Hupnouse - a typically Barabbas title, from "nous" for streetwise, with "hup" (as in "hup, ye boy ye") - is, they insist, "very definitely a play" in the way they are going about it. Yet it was written very much into their three-to-a-bed clown personas by designer and comedian Charlie O'Neill, who clowned on the street with Raymond in the old Grapevine Arts Centre days.

Written entirely in a kind of makeyuppy language of inverted and stuck-together words (almost as in a la A Clockwork Orange), Hupnouse is a very peculiar parable of three, amnesiac, marginalised creatures who end up in a junkyard zone on the edge of civilisation, while property development bulldozers loom ever closer. Graphically recycling their bodily excreta, they inhabit a shared, sexualised child-world as they attempt to excavate deeper sadnesses within their lives and characters.

With Keane directing, Simon O'Gorman, an English-born actor of prodigious diction, has been drafted in to play the third part. I rather put him on the spot by asking what it was like to work with a trio so plainly symbiotic? He paused, bemused, before laughing out a line from the play - "I suppose I shlip-settled in like a duck out of water".

"No, it's grand. It's not so different to working on any other show to be honest with you. You hear about `the Barabbas style' and `the way they work', and I never really knew what that was, and I still don't in a way."

Veronica: "Generally, I don't think there is a Barabbas style as such, we're just doing theatre like anybody else, but there is a Barrabas thing, a process."

Mikel: "Normally we take eight weeks to devise a show. We have a system of disciplines and games we like to play, and clowning, without any pretentious notions, is actually a very good discipline for performers to learn. When you clown well, or you understand where you're going into the thing, it's probably one of the truest expositions of your personality. Obviously theatre is a discipline where you have to heighten things, but it's a matter of being true to yourself."

Veronica: "When we started we were influenced by the buffoon tradition, but you train and then you move on, and things either fall off or stick with you, but there's something about the fundamental discipline of the theatre of the clown which is very dear to us and even if we're not working in red nose there's always the lesson or the influence of it.

Mikel: "It's not just a matter of sticking on the red noses and arsing around entertaining each other. The whole drive is improvisation and when it happens, you start tripping on it. Core ideas come up, and you start knitting together a patchwork -"

Veronica: "We draw up maps quite a lot - if ever we give up theatre, we'll be orienteers, I think."

Mikel: "Yeah, big sheets of paper, with everybody using different coloured markers, drawing in the peaks and troughs as it's coming together in your head . . ."

"Oh yeah, you could spend a day's rehearsals at that now, no problem," said Raymond looking rather dry-throated, as a slightly worried director.

But daft as they may seem, the three have notched up some considerable achievements. Certainly, they've come a long way since their first Barabbas festival five years ago, a crazily ambitious first round of three new shows in two weeks, including two they devised themselves and a Macbeth directed by Gerry Stembridge, their part-mentor and chairman of their board.

APART from Murfi's extraordinary solo performance in Strokehauling (based on an old photograph of a fag-lipped character who has become their logo), their biggest success has been their anarchic deconstruction of the old Lennox Robinson comedy, The White-Headed Boy. Again directed by Stembridge, with the three conjuring grotesque, doubled-up caricatures around an angelic Louis Lovett in the title role, it has seen more than 100 performances, with another, 40-date US tour coming up in September.

Always controlling their own creative freedom, they have firmed up the company with two full-time administrative staff, while the board (comprising themselves, Stembridge and O'Neill) will shortly be filled out by a management consultant and a PR professional, in order to "redress the artistic bias".

Veronica is now full-time artistic director on a one-year contract, although the position might devolve to one of the other two next year.

Mikel: "We just needed somebody full-time, as you have to programme a couple of years ahead of yourself."

Veronica: "But the role doesn't operate in isolation. Contractually, it functions as director, but it very much operates from the artistic base that is Barabbas."

Raymond: "Essentially it's a guidance position, but there's always three heads in the pot."

Mikel: "It's a mad situation but it actually functions terribly well. Otherwise you have three people who aren't paid by the company except when they're in production."

Veronica: "And you'll never get past a certain point unless you have the luxury -"

Raymond: "- and focus -"

Veronica: "- to plan properly. Essentially it's the difference between good management and crisis management, and being able to think longer than the end of your nose."

Apart from box-office, the company survives on a £75,000 Arts Council grant (plus a £15,000 challenge grant which, uniquely, Barabbas need not match in corporate sponsorship, and a Dublin Corporation grant to subsidise pay-as-what-can matinees. Remarkably, after Hupnouse, their next piece, Brilliant Days Blue, is a coproduction with The Abbey, and in quite a coup, it will play four weeks on the Abbey mainstage next February. Directed by Coburn and Murfi, the cast will have Raymond Keane and 15 actresses.

After that, they all got back to rehearsals, or "poking the set": Coburn picking out pathways over the junk, O'Gorman launching into haywire routines with multiple mobile phones, and Murfi dangling upside down from a scrap-metal tree like an orang-utan in a pair of ski-boots.

I came away shaking my head, but with a sideways grin spreading across my face.

Hupnouse opens at Project @ the Mint on Tuesday, May 11th