‘What does a woman have to do to be remembered?’ ask Sh!t Theatre, the duo stood naked on the yawning, pink-draped stage of the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room. It’s a good question. Rollerskate in said state of undress while a video of Andrew Lloyd Webber DJing Phantom of the Opera plays? Travel to Argentina, then Spain, in an attempt to track down a living historical figure they’ve become obsessed with? Write a musical about this woman that leads to a lightly threatening (and extremely passive aggressive) email from Lloyd Webber’s legal team?
It’s something theatremakers Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have been thinking a lot about since they became interested in Isabel Perón, the second wife of Argentinian president Juan Perón. Of course, as their earlier project DollyWould proved, a play about a prominent woman is more than a simple biopic when done by Sh!t Theatre. That show explored the inevitability of death by way of Dolly Parton; here, under Ursula Martinez’s direction, they wrestle with legacy, memory, grief, having (and not having) children, and even democracy. The result is a predictably anarchic production, one rife with levity and remarkable profundity.
While most audience members won’t have heard of Isabel – I certainly hadn’t – we know of Juan’s first wife, Eva, remembered in life, history, and Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical as Evita. Evita Too was first staged at Soho Theatre in 2022; since then, Jamie Lloyd’s edgy musical revival has put her story to song once again. But, as Biscuit and Mothersole repeatedly put it, inaccuracies in the stage show by the men who wrote her mean we misremember/‘mister-remember’ Eva.
In front of images of Rachel Zegler’s Evita in a bralet and shorts, shown in a powerpoint on screen, a raised eyebrowed Biscuit and Mothersole paint Eva as a ‘power-hungry slut’ who died of ‘being tired’. ALW has a lot to answer for when it comes to her warped legacy (and in general, but I digress). As Biscuit and Mothersole remind us, the words ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’ are carved into Eva’s grave, despite her never saying them.
But at least Eva gets remembered at all, they argue. Because Juan’s lesser-known second wife Isabel, with her Thatcher-esque bouffant, wasn’t just Argentina’s first lady; from July 1974 to March 1976, she was its president too: the first female president in the world. As Sh!t Theatre note through deadpan song: ‘She never planned to do it and she wasn’t very good, but she was the first’.
Determined to tell her story, with all its bizarre beats, Sh!t Theatre take us on a musical theatre through Isabel’s life, from go-go dancer to exiled nonagenarian living in Spain. But this is no boring history lesson. We get original songs performed in clear harmony, and that Sh!t Theatre trademark, some good old-fashioned alcohol-related audience participation. It keeps the story moving at pace – even if a somewhat unnecessary interval, the company’s first ever, causes a drop in momentum.
It fast becomes clear that Isabel’s story is one worth telling. It involves a man known as ‘The Wizard’ and Eva’s embalmed corpse, which Isabel had displayed on the dining room table of Juan’s home in Spain. The body appears in Evita Too as a grotesque, life-size puppet with a swollen, Spitting Image-esque face and an uncanny resemblance to a certain musical theatre impresario…
Created with incredible detail by Freddie Hayes, the corpse embodies Evita Too as much as Eva: offbeat and weird, dark and a bit disconcerting, but with real artistry that you can’t draw your eyes away from. It’s also a meta reminder of the lucrative musical Sh!t Theatre are referencing (or for the sake of their lawyers, not referencing), just like the pauses in the show to list the unsolicited feedback they have received from male audience.
Because as much as Evita Too is a show about legacy, it's also a show about gender and the way men dictate women’s stories in life and death. Watching Sh!t Theatre perform in central London, we might not have known about Isabel Perón before. But a lot of people in Argentina are surprisingly unaware of her either. In a surprising twist, Biscuit and Mothersole go to Buenos Aires, where they film themselves explaining Isabel’s very existence to their bewildered-looking waitress via her Wikipedia page.
Isabel is clearly a stand-in for the theatremakers, who talk on stage about grief and feeling that they have missed the boat on having children. Eva was widowed too, and never had kids of her own. Was that the reason nobody knows who she is, even in the country she ruled? The question comes up again: “What does a woman have to do to be remembered”, if the first female president of any country can’t do it? Make a ridiculous, beautiful, defiant piece of theatre about her? That might be a start.
