13 – 16 May

Philosophy of the World is the name of the only studio-recorded album of The Shaggs, a three-piece band based in Fremont, New Hampshire. Formed in 1968 and made up of three sisters, Dot, Betty and Helen Wiggin, occasionally joined by their sister Rachel on bass, it was their father, Austin, driven by a premonition of his mother’s that the girls would one day be famous, who drove them to perform. None of the girls, personally, had any interest or ambition to be musicians, let alone famous ones, but that was not going to stop the seething ambition of their dad, who instilled a regime of enforced practice and calisthenics in the family basement, at the same time coercively controlling their social lives.

Theatre company In Bed With My Brother have seized the story of The Shaggs as the perfect vehicle, parable really, of patriarchy and power. They have also woven into this hour plus of mayhem the story of Valerie Solanis, author of the SCUM manifesto, published at the time The Shaggs were being corralled into being an act by their dad. That manifesto advocated for the elimination of the male sex, blaming men for all the ills of humankind. Solanis’s rage culminated with the attempted assassination of artist Andy Warhol in 1968 for appropriating a script she had given him.

So, a cauldron of feminist rage to conjure here. In Bed with My Brother, that is writers and performers Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory, take this frustration to boiling point in a performance that starts by showing the vulnerability of the Wiggin girls, their painful first public performances in which we, their audience, are encouraged to jeer at them and chuck Pepsi (Warhol connection) cans in their direction. The acting space starts to resemble a recycling tip, with cans being crunched as the actors manoeuvre the cluttered space. Hired hand Neil Haigh performs the roles of the dad, Austin Wiggin, and the band’s stage manager, meting out much male-entitled supremacy, but later taking some mighty beatings in return from this empowered trio.

As Alexander, Lynn and Cory mime to the Shaggs’ shy voicings and two out-of-tune guitars with a drum beat on its own trajectory, we are left in no doubt that these are people way out of their comfort zone with little aptitude for what they are being asked to do. Then, boom, it’s another calisthenics session back in the basement. Their dad keeps ramping up the regime, till the free-floating moment where Dot, Betty and Helen realise they don’t have to ‘do this’ anymore when, suddenly, he is no longer there. But the ghost of Austin will repeatedly rise and many more emotional battles will have to be won. Or is this a toxic dad legacy that will never lose its potency?

Alexander, Lynn and Cory throw everything at this, ending up bare chested, thrashing a drum set while scrawling chalked elements of the play on a rear blackboard. Their piece crosses over, fearlessly, into art installation, pure punk ‘fuck-offness’ and the audience love it.

Before the show starts, the room is filled with the wall blistering sounds of Territorial Pissings by Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. Cobain was a great fan of The Shaggs, and was known for his observations about the mistreatment of women.  If you google The Shaggs lyrics, you’ll come across heart-breaking lines such as “We do our best, we try to please, but we’re like the rest, we are never at ease…” Maybe that says it all. In Bed With My Brother’s sensational homage is a reset worth experiencing.

★★★★☆. Simon Bishop, 14 May 2026