‘So… we think this is based on a true story.’ Opening Jack Nicholls’ debut play The Shitheads, these words instantly instil a sense of nervousness in the audience, a scepticism in what they’re about to watch. I mean, the cragged stone wall that spans the length of the stage seems pretty realistic. This is a show about cavepeople; caves are to be expected.
Don’t be fooled. It might be set tens of thousands of years in the past, but The Shitheads couldn’t be further from some historical re-enactment where characters dress in animal hides and communicate only in grunts. Instead, Nicholls, along with directors Aneesha Srinivasan and David Byrne, have created a strange, macabre, properly funny piece of theatre about the human condition that ponders on the future as much as the past.
The concepts of ‘reality’ and ‘history’ are disrupted almost as soon as The Shitheads starts, when a majestic, ghostly puppet elk canters onto stage. Designed by Finn Caldwell and Dulcie Best and controlled by the cast, it is a breathtaking sight: huge in scale, eerie in look, with fabric trailing from its antlers and suggesting decay.
The elk is being chased by strong-headed Clare (Jacoba Williams), and frenetic, jumpy Greg (Jonny Khan). The pair have only just met but bicker like old friends, Greg gleefully goading Clare while also warning her that she should be moving south. ‘The country’s going to die,’ he says. ‘The weather’s going to kill it.’ Clare is uninterested in his premonition of ‘ice and floods and black grass and animals turning’. She lives here, in a cave, with her family. The people on the outside are Shitheads, a lesser species. Still, she’s surprised to learn that Greg can talk, because Shitheads can’t speak, right?
Williams and Khan establish the world of The Shitheads with gusto. The oftentimes childlike dialogue is spoken at great speed, with words rushed out (and often stumbled over) with feverish excitement. They engage in a tantalising back and forth to assert dominance. It’s equal parts flirtatious and violent. Eyes widen, tongues lick teeth, mouths pant. Williams, who is on stage for nearly the entire hour-and-40-minute run time, manages to make this raw, animalistic performance look easy, a skill in itself.
Without spoiling the plot, it’s Clare who comes out on top. Nicholls’ text then shifts inwards, to the cave where Clare lives with her squealing younger sister Lisa (a scene-stealing, magnetic Annabel Smith) and their father Adrian (Peter Clements, referred to somewhat unnervingly as ‘Daddy’ throughout). A bizarre parody of a domestic comedy unfurls, with Anna Reid’s set mimicking a living room ripped from a family sitcom. Lighting fixtures made of bones drop from the ceiling, while a lampshade glows in the distance. There are rugs on the floor, and even a real fire bursts out of the ground. It’s My Family: The Cannibal Years.
With the arrival of Greg’s partner Annabel (Ami Tredea) and her puppet baby (controlled by puppetry captain Scarlet Wilderink) the action morphs into something far stranger. Shifting between reality and dreams, imagination, stories, the production is infused with a woozy quality, only aided as Asaf Zohar’s soundtrack as it flows from hyper-realistic nature soundscapes to soft easy listening jazz and then ’80s synth-pop.
These anachronistic moments are odd but integral. This is the distant past, yet the world being destroyed by the weather feels eerily prescient in our own time of climate catastrophe. Reid and Evelien van Camp’s costumes directly reference the connection between then and now. Adrian might wear a coat of pelts, but animal print and leather are dotted into the other costumes through patterned leggings and t-shorts, worn alongside cargo shorts, gilets and dungaree dresses. Look closely, and the modern world is here too.
The Shitheads doesn’t leave us with lessons on how to survive a climate disaster; nor does it aim to. Rather, it is a piece of theatre that takes big swings, humorous and horrific, in an effort to remind us that we all do terrible things to survive. Violence and love go hand in hand. The human condition is eternal. Hunting those truths down is easy; they couldn’t hide from you if you tried.
