24 – 26 February

The Wardrobe Theatre is full. Properly full. That particular fringe atmosphere where the room feels shared and alert, like everyone knows they’re about to witness something that could either collapse or completely land.

Created and performed by Sam Kruger and S E Grummett, SLUGS opens by insisting it’s about nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. They repeat it until it stops sounding throwaway and starts feeling structural. If it’s about nothing, then what exactly are we here for?

The opening is immediate. Techno pulse. Flashlights cutting hard lines. PVC catching the light. Customised sleeping bags centre stage, prostrate like an offering. It flirts with chaos for a second and then sharpens. The timing is too tight. The rhythm too controlled.

The DJ set drives the piece. It isn’t background; it’s the engine. Language spirals into deliberate brain-rot absurdity, affirmations that collapse under their own meaning. The DIY slug suits are ridiculous and theatrically effective. The crowd work is elastic but precise. What looks messy is clearly held.

Visually, there’s more intelligence here than the lo-fi aesthetic first suggests. Miniature details sit alongside larger visual statements. Lo-fi video reframes rather than decorates. Towering imagery shifts the scale of the stage entirely, turning the room into something closer to an installation than a gig.

Then the puppet section arrives and the atmosphere changes. Pure joy, irony stripped and the audience leans forward instinctively. It’s playful, inventive and genuinely funny. I could have stayed there longer.

The tone pivots again. Trousers off. Gender unsettled. The longer bodies remain exposed, the less it reads as shock and the more it feels like insistence. Not provocation but presence. The show keeps circling the same question underneath it all: what does anything mean? What does nothing mean? It brushes against nihilism but never disappears into it.

There is a lot happening. DJ sets, non-sequiturs, slug pellets, escalating visuals. At times it edges toward overload. You are either inside it or you’re not. But the control never drops. By the end, resolution feels irrelevant. SLUGS may claim to be about nothing, but its commitment to its own unflinching logic is what makes it formidable.

★★★★☆  Tilly Marshall, 26 February 2026

Photographer credit:  Matt Simpson