Sh!t theatre are Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit and in this show we are invited to see them ‘at home’. And what a home! Windsor House is a cramped, noisy, pigeon infested council flat in grim Manor House, North London, which despite a muscular attempt by estate agents to rebrand the area as ‘a few minutes away from Harrods’ with access to a kayaking lake is, well, quite frankly still a bit sh!t.
In this highly entertaining, personally revealing and slightly political piece the two actual flatmates – or friends as Louise prefers to call themselves– explore the lives of people who used to live in their unloved and messy flat. What do people do with letters that arrive for unknown former occupants? The Bristol audience surprised the performers by adamantly calling for them to be returned to sender, but what happened here was that they were opened up and the performers turned detectives in an attempt to track down what happened to the previous tenants.
The show mixes musical ditties, projection and performance and despite a slightly disjointed attempt to hit several moving targets, it delivers highly on laughs, pathos and the absurdity of not having enough money to live comfortably. There were several hilarious video scenes around the lives lived by former tenants who had moved out and onto apparently better things. In one standout series of montages we see the dingy reality of Manor House where people smoke crack in telephone kiosks, sleep in tents behind advertising hoardings and discard mattresses in decaying car parks all superimposed over an upmarket promotional marketing soundtrack for a new development where flats cost almost £1m.
However, it’s when the performers’ own relationship is explored that the real force of the show is poignantly made apparent. People change at different rates as they grow older and these very personal tensions help to form a counterpoint to the more knockabout comedy routines. Even when the dialogue is delivered from inside a post box. The pressures of co-habiting in a small flat with friends who are often fragile, needy and selfish can be difficult and even more so when a joint professional future depends on getting by to get by.
This is an accurate tale of ‘Generation Rent’ and seems particularly apt now that the great home owning democracy is in reverse. Mothersole and Biscuit explore the politics and morality of living slightly on the edge with an authentic voice. Photographic evidence demonstrates that they know what it’s like to live in a squalid flat with a dodgy avaricious landlord when you have too much time on your hands and a constant nagging worry about the future. Without employing a full on agit prop style, it reveals an affectionate, lively and very funny look at the lives of millennials in a London that increasingly discriminates between the haves and have nots.
Sh!t Theatre are, despite the name, not rubbish at all. ★★★★☆ Bryan Mason 23rd March 2017
