Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Or What’s Left of Us
Sh*t Theatre
Genre: Live Music, New Writing, Theatre
Venue: Summerhall
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Sh*t Theatre keep their sh*t together and we should all be grateful for that. Their new show poetically expresses what it is to mourn a loved one and how joy can be found in community and song.
Written and performed by Rebecca Biscuit & Louise Mothersole with Dramaturg Ursula Martinez, presented in association with Soho Theatre.
Review
Summerhall’s Tech Cube seems an unlikely space to hold a folk sing-a-round. Yet the presence of Rebecca Biscuit & Louise Mothersole (their names sound straight out of The Wicker Man) ensures there is bonhomie and warmth from the off.
Sh*t Theatre have a rich back catalogue of shows that blend music, politics, personal stories and laughs and that play games with what’s real and what’s not. Often based on immersing themselves in a culture, from Dolly Parton & the USA (Dollywould 2017), the Royals (Letters to Windsor House 2017) and 2019’s stand-out Sh*t Theatre Drink Rum with Expats, centred on the pub in Malta in which Oliver Reed drank his last, they have surprised and provoked audiences around the world.
This new show is rather different, as the pair emerge from a year of life-changing experiences that have caused them to question whether they can make theatre anymore. Thankfully, with grit, generosity and a strong, all-female team, they have made an affecting piece that shares their love of song, their exploration and experience of folk traditions and their pain.
Wearing a succession of exquisite folk-inspired head-dresses by Liza Violet, first as badgers emerging from torpor, later jackalopes and corn dolly crowns, Becky and Louise take us with them to a folk club in West Yorkshire and a Suffolk folk festival, gathering songs and stories from characters they meet. Four large, folk themed woodcut illustrations by Bunty May Marshall provide a backdrop. A wassail bowl collects slops from people’s drinks and is roundly quaffed by Becky; drinking may not help heal sorrow but they’ll do it anyway, with funerals, airports or ‘accidental’ the best scenarios for the drunk.
The tale of John Barleycorn with his many, horrific, ways to die is a constant thread; like a memory he keeps coming back. On mandolin, guitars, squeeze box or acapella, the singing is divine despite the rule in folk, as in life, that nothing needs to be good. Also a constant is the reference to ‘those Japanese bowls’ mended with gold, a metaphor for the making of theatre which has helped them put themselves back together.
Songs about death, however joyfully, or ‘joy adjacently’ they’re presented, take their toll. The closing sequence, under Josephine Tremelling’s atmospheric lighting, as Becky and Louise recount the circumstances that have brought them to this place, may break you. The final song, fittingly, is The Parting Glass, sung unaccompanied in a melody new to me. It is, the song-sheet says, ‘often sung at wakes, and to send drunk people home to bed at the end of a good night.’
Or What’s Left of Us poetically expresses what it is to mourn a loved one and how joy can be found in community and song. At the end of the show the Company is awarded a Summerhall Lustrom Prize for work which demonstrates the healing power of art. The show, and the sing-a-long after party, does just that.
