At the beginning of their new show Philosophy of the World, the three members of In Bed with My Brother – that’s Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn and Kat Cory – shuffle on sheepishly to announce that they’re now so skint that they’ve been forced to write a commercial show with a linear narrative that will feature absolutely no nudity.
This is all a lie (apart from probably the being skint part) and what follows continues the trio’s tradition of coming up with shows that actually sound like middlebrow-awards bait, but are in fact splenetic leftfield punk-rock conflagrations in which they take their tops off. So there was Tricky Second Album, their show ‘about’ the KLF burning a million, that was really a caustic takedown of the exploitative nature of the theatre industry. Most recently, PRIME_TIME at the Barbican was an assault on Jeff Bezos so frenzied that it didn’t concern itself with any sort of contextualisation or scene setting but just consisted of an escalating series of insults and murder fantasies – hating elevated to raw art.
Now they’ve (sort of) set their sights on The Shaggs, one of the all-time great musical oddities. Hailing from smalltown New Hampshire, the sibling trio’s domineering father was told by a fortune teller that his daughters would be in a successful rock band, something he chose to wholeheartedly believe. And so throughout the late ’60s and first half of the ’70s, Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin were dragooned into becoming The Shaggs, who recorded a single album, Philosophy of the World. Their primitive, idiosyncratic music was heavily mocked, although they found a local audience at the weekly gigs they were made to play (in part because punters were lpromised of a free can of soda). When their father died they disbanded instantly. But they had a curious afterlife after a succession of more avant-garde musicians – from Frank Zappa to Kurt Cobain – became enamoured with their primitivist sound.
It’s a great story! One that In Bed with My Brother tell us Tom Cruise has purchased the rights to. I doubt he’d make anything like this, however. Though some of The Shaggs’ music is included, it’s hardly put on a pedestal and the score is instead dominated by furious techno (which is partly deployed in illustration of the fact the girls were made to do a lot of calisthenics).
After the band breaks up, the show cracks open, its thin veneer of narrative coherency shattering to reveal something molten and dangerous. The band repeatedly murder their stage manager, played by guest actor Nigel Barrett. He rises and puts them back ‘in their place’. We’re encouraged to chug our complimentary fizzy drinks, crush them, then throw them at the band (now wearing helmets). It becomes increasingly wild and free-form; there is a palpable hostility to what IBWMB seem to strongly view as patronisation of The Shaggs when they were ‘rediscovered’, a feeling they should have been left alone. It moves onto Valerie Solanas, and sympathy is expressed for her shooting Andy Warhol after he refused to hand back the manuscript of her play, Up Your Ass. It becomes a roaring, discordant symphony without any clear shape at all really, but with rage at male exploitation of women pulsing through its poetry of noise.
Exactly what you get out of Philosophy of the World is likely to vary – the middle in particular is testing, all gut level and visceral, a Rorschach test of noise and anger that will mean different things to different people (some of whom will clearly hate it, though I assume the 10.45pm start time weeds out the casual tourists).
In Bed with My Brother joke and fret about the concept of selling out enough for it to clearly be a concern for them. They have an obvious respect for Kurt Cobain, the rock legend who despised his own success. As usual with their shows, the trio refuse to take a bow at the end, and when Barrett tells us there are t-shirts for sale afterwards it seems like a sardonic joke. But there actually are! And they’re very cool t-shirts. Merch isn’t selling out if it’s cool. And In Bed with My Brother haven’t sold out – if anything this show is actually less accessible than the relatively big budget PRIME_TIME. There’s nobody doing it quite like them – furious voices, howling in a wilderness they’d rather die than leave.