Sh!t Theatre, Drink Rum with Expats, review: sharp comedy that flips between cat videos and car bombs – Telegraph.co.uk

Rather than a spoonful of sugar, this canny performance-art duo are serving up free booze and well-honed comedy to help their political theatre go down a treat. Beginning as a likeably chaotic dispatch from Malta, complete with multimedia and vulgar vocabulary lessons, their latest work stealthily shifts into darker territory: corruption, migrants and murder.

In 2018, Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, aka Sh!t Theatre, were invited to create a show to mark Vallettas year as European City of Culture by their friend Charlie (who looks like a dictators wife, who has just poisoned him). Semi-joking that they were attracted by the cash and a free holiday, they originally planned to theme the piece around their last year of being Europeans, ahead of Brexit.

Their Maltese base of operations, re-created on stage, is The Pub, a dingy expat watering hole where Oliver Reed died in 1999 while filming Gladiator. The venue sells stomach-churning merchandise inspired by this morbid brush with fame, including T-shirts emblazoned with Reeds final order: eight pints of lager, 12 double rums, 14 whiskeys. Those shirts are part of the performers costumes, along with naval jackets with epaulettes, the Brits-abroad classic socks with sandals, and faces painted with a mix of the St Georges and Maltese crosses.

The show, which began at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019, originally had plenty of audience interaction necessarily rejigged here because of Covid, and with mixed results; theres the odd longueur. Otherwise, this is a slick operation that merely feints at anarchy, thanks in part to director/dramaturg Adam Brace. There is remarkable fluency between the two performers, who either trade off lighting-fast lines (punctuated by shots of rum) or speak in unison, supported by well-timed and creative use of video and audio clips, photographs, illustrations, news reports and repurposed sea shanties.

Their, and our, initial tourist introduction to Malta is wryly comic as we encounter absurdities like the roundabouts that no local driver understands, or, courtesy of a deeply religious society, Virgin Mary statues guarding the eggs in supermarkets. But the chatter about why Brits love living here sea, sun and fiscal freedom becomes more loaded as they discuss the semantic difference between expat and immigrant. Why does the government criminalise those desperate refugees making an often-fatal journey across the Mediterranean, but allow anyone to buy citizenship for 650,000? The journalist asking those uncomfortable questions, Daphne Caruana Galizia, is brutally silenced.

The brilliance of this production is its absurdist juxtaposition, flipping between cat videos and car bombs, cheese platters and torture, while seeded motifs, like dogs and passports, gain new significance. It interrogates how we consume news, which stories were allowed to tell, and our inescapable interconnectedness: this is as much about our own island, too.

Yet even as the show becomes increasingly topical (including up-to-the-minute script additions) and blazingly confrontational, its still playful, personal and thoroughly entertaining theatre that never feels like a lecture. Both horror and humour linger long afterwards.

Until Sept 11. Tickets: 020 7478 0100; sohotheatre.com

Read the original post:

Sh!t Theatre, Drink Rum with Expats, review: sharp comedy that flips between cat videos and car bombs - Telegraph.co.uk