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Sh!t Theatre make incredibly profound art in an incredibly ridiculous-looking way.
For over a decade the face-painted duo of Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have basically pissed around in a series of increasingly esoteric ways, and unerringly spun it into theatrical gold. ‘Holiday snap remix art’ is what they glibly dismiss their entire oeuvre as in new show ‘Evita Too’, and there’s ring of truth to it: this show and predecessors ‘Shit Theatre Drink Rum with Expats’ and ‘DollyWould’ have all revolved around them going on a trip somewhere warm and making a show about it.
And what shows! ‘DollyWould’ was a celebration of Dolly Parton that was also very much about the inevitability of death; ‘Ex-Pats’ was about (duh) ex-pats in Malta, but also a searing indictment of corruption in Western politics. And here’s ‘Evita Too’, a superficially jaunty show about a forgotten female President that’s really about ageing, art and the erasure of women.
The title refers to Isabel Peron: the first female President of not only Argentina, but any country. She has been largely forgotten, in part thanks to the fact the fact Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote a hugely successful, largely inaccurate musical about her husband Juan Peron’s previous wife, Eva Peron (aka Evita).
The wheeze with ‘Evita Too’, then, is that Biscuit and Mothersole have supposedly tried to write a Webber-baiting musical about Isabel. They need it to be an enormous hit because this project is their first in years to not receive Arts Council funding, after they fell foul of rule changes that declared their work needed to be more beneficial to others (something the pair are morbidly amused by).
Thus inevitably the duo went out to Argentina, where they discovered that Isabel wasn’t much better remembered; they even attempted to track the now 91-year-old down in Madrid, but had no joy either.
This is all a lot of fun: electro-pop songs about how Isabel only had a modestly-sized death squad, lurid factoids about Isabel and Juan keeping Evita’s embalmed corpse hanging up in their kitchen (the show features a puppet corpse), footage of them in a Peron-themed bar in Buenos Aires chatting to a waitress who’d never heard of Isabel.
The show details how Isabel got erased from history by dickhead men (Webber, Juan, the military junta that overthrow her, some really bad guy called ‘The Wizard’), but about how she couldn’t actually live up to the pair’s fantasies of her as a wronged heroine (she had death squads, remember?).
But it’s also a show about Sh!t Theatre and how at the age of 34 they find themselves defunded, torn over whether they want kids, and pondering whether to have their eggs frozen before they’re classified as medically geriatric. If this sounds funny – it’s kind of not at all really. At one point Biscuit comments that her having a baby would be the end for Sh!t Theatre (because it simply wouldn’t be logistically or financially viable for the company to carry on), and it’s a slap to the face.
And it’s far from the last gutpunch moment in the show, in which the longevity of their careers is ruthlesly tied to their biology. They’re not directly comparing themselves to Peron, who disappeared from view after a brief political career. But the associations are there, not least via Webber and Rice, who it’s pointed out have fathered numerous children without notably slowing their careers for it.
‘Directurged’ by the quietly influential fringe man Adam Brace, ‘Evita Too’ never preaches to us but chucks out a barrage of skits, songs, videos, nudity and other japes and sort of leaves us to form our own impression, a sort of live art Rorschach test.
You could probably watch it and not particularly think about their personal stuff at all; or you could conclude that it’s really a show about Sh!t Theatre with Peron essentially there as a whacking great allegory. Any which way, it’s powerful, hilarious and troubling. Is it the end of the line for the pair? Or is it the start of a longer commitment to essentially do this forever? Each, in its way, comes with notes of tragedy.