18 – 20 March
Grief is never tidy. Funeral Teeth isn’t, either. The latest from Rio Montana Topley, Katja de la Fuente, and Amy Stephenson-Yankuba of Succulent Theatre, following their raucous debut NASTY, crams an astonishing number of intimate, awkward, and raw moments into an hour, sometimes feeling like an overstuffed suitcase of experience. At its best, it is gut-busting and gut-wrenching in equal measure; at its messiest, it’s a flurry of moments that don’t always cohere. But maybe that’s the point.
What starts as a confessional comedy about sex, queerness, and coming-of-age anxieties swerves suddenly into an exploration of grief. The show’s structure is deliberately chaotic, with stories piling on top of each other in a way that feels both exhilarating and overwhelming. The grief here isn’t poetic or neatly framed; it’s an intrusion, jarring and abrupt, much like real loss. Elsewhere, childhood memories, road trips with grandparents, and painfully awkward sexual encounters are played for laughs, but always with an undercurrent of something deeper. Nostalgia that doesn’t quite land with purpose, a sense of self still being reckoned with in hindsight.
The queerness of Funeral Teeth feels organic and unforced, particularly in the way it interrogates past sexual experiences. It explores the pressure to perform desire in a way that aligns with expectation, how, in retrospect, some encounters feel like they were ticking a box rather than embracing genuine attraction. The use of hazy, dreamlike lighting underscores this uncertainty, blurring past and present, reality and memory.
Yet, despite its strengths, Funeral Teeth sometimes feels like it’s trying to do too much. The postmodern self-awareness, the knowing delivery, the use of ‘fuck’ as shorthand for intensity or laughs, occasionally keeps the audience at arm’s length. Are we meant to take these deeply personal confessions as truth, or are they performance? The line is thin and not always convincingly walked. Some stories feel like they’d hit harder with more room to breathe. The show’s relentless pacing means that powerful moments don’t always get the weight they deserve. The conveyor belt of vignettes is engaging, but less might have been more.
What holds everything together is the strength of the performances. Rio Montana Topley, Katja de la Fuente, and Amy Stephenson-Yankuba are all immediately likeable, drawing in the audience with an easy intimacy that makes even the cringiest moments feel safe. The physical staging is smart, allowing the actors to slip fluidly between time periods with minimal clutter. Sound and music choices are sharp, providing well-timed beats of comic relief and emotional punctuation.
For a show titled Funeral Teeth, the engagement with death itself feels a little shallow. This is more a meditation on loss; loss of innocence, loss of self, loss of past versions of who you thought you were; than a deep dive into grief. The tonal shifts are abrupt, sometimes uncomfortably so, and the show’s candour about sexual consent and past personas will be deeply resonant for many. Yet there’s a sense that, in trying to say so much, Funeral Teeth leaves some of its richest material just out of reach.
Still, grief isn’t neat. Maybe Funeral Teeth isn’t trying to be, either.
★★★★☆ Tilly Marshall, 19 March 2025
