FringeReview UK 2026
The Shitheads
Royal Court in association with Brian and Dayna Lee
Genre: Comedic, Drama, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
A young woman is amazed the man she encounters can talk. It has consequences, and conditioning plays a part. Especially when you’re hunting a huge Irish elk. Jack Nicholls’ debut play The Shitheads is co directed at the Royal Court Upstairs by David Byrne and Aneesha Srinivasan till March 14.
Aa a blazing new voice though The Shitheads packs a flinty punch; and paradoxically heralds a vivid poetic talent. A must-see.
Review
In one sense the deep future bites the tail of c. 50,000 BC. Perhaps we project savagery backwards onto cave walls like a magic lantern, obliterating the cave art. Indeed this production involves Persian rugs and a standard lamp. There’s savage humour but The Flintstones it isn’t. A young woman is amazed the man she encounters can talk. It has consequences, and conditioning plays a part. Especially when you’re hunting a huge Irish elk. Jack Nicholls’ debut play The Shitheads is co-directed at the Royal Court Upstairs by David Byrne and Aneesha Srinivasan till March 14.
Anna Reid’s striking set dominates, with a cave mouth, a fissure and running pyrites stripes with unusual colourings that give someone later on a clue. Though there’s reddish cave drawings this realistic scene is subverted by those rugs and lamp as well as chair. With Reid’s and Evelien Can Camp’s costumes too, Reid might be saying history even prehistory is cyclical, though that’s not Nicholls’ aim. Lit by Alex Fernandes you can believe the cave dwellers at least – and moments of the hunt – are indeed magical. Asaf Zohar’s music and sound design veers from eerie to pop, and at farcical moments Fernandes’ light-design obliges. There’s a glowingly-lit postlude too, with a final Nicholls joke.
Clare (Jacoba Williams) meets Greg (Jonny Khan) and, amazed he can talk, asks him more. This is after a spectacular scene where Finn Caldwell’s puppetry, led by Scarlett Wilderink, conjures a hulking elk. It takes two to down it, an extended sequence with brief exchanges. After, the slightly garrulous Greg answers the intrigued Clare all she wants to know. About his family, partner Danielle and baby. They’re heading south, where crocodiles live. They can’t believe people dwell in caves. Clare can’t believe they migrate such vast distances (nor perhaps can we). The world “dies” and is reborn, invoking ice ages; and in “dies”, remains (un)naturally prescient of climate catastrophes. It inures those who stay to a more remorseless way of life.
Clare’s incredulous because she sees herself and her cave-dwelling family as “magic”. That’s teen sister Lisa (Anabel Smith) and limping but deranged father Adrian (Peter Clements). Unlike the primitive non-verbal ‘shitheads’ who live out on the bare earth, they can tell stories and weather winters. Nicholls tacitly draws an assumed distinction between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal, but is clear there’s no physical distinction; obvious contemporary assumptions and parallels furnish all the ferocity of boundaries. Particularly when imaginary. Hence contemporary names too.
Nicholls’ imagination is ferocious too. His poems, for which he’s previously been best-known, encompass a ‘Mum with a Sword’, a naturally mummified cat and a beheaded skull set lovingly on a plinth by relatives, asking them questions. Certainly ritual and reliquaries play a part in Nicholls’ imaginary, and they do here, in comically savage scenes; or ones savagely satirical.
Williams disarms as both warmly curious and brutally matter-of-fact, with a register of tonal difference to suit her own slow transformations. The long instruction of her father Adrian, about how to gain knowledge might seem singular. Though it’s tapped from accounts and suppositions of ancient societies. Clare has begun to question it after an action of her own. Clements’ skirling-voiced patriarch Adrian is rendered sympathetic though his own storytelling of his dead partner, the girls’ mother, far more capable than he. Now bought low by numerous injuries (a bit like the patriarch in One Million Years BC) he’s mostly prone in a Victorian chair. Khan earlier flourishes with a similar speech. Smith, scampering and frolicking about, cuts a different energy: someone who must grow up fast but hasn’t yet. Danielle (Ami Tredrea) when she appears is vocally wary and wily, anxious and displaced but capable of an equal vehemence.
Nichols is excellent at characterising people whose way of understanding is both alien and conditioned. But he also admits of change though knowledge, even via disenchantment, though whether it can come in time for some is open. Continual switchbacks of sympathy leave this engrossing, thrilling and darkly funny play unpredictable till the end. It’s occasionally drawn-out, and there’s atmospheric silences too. At 105 minutes when I saw it, it could possibly lose about ten. Once or twice the text is superseded by more direct action. Aa a blazing new voice though The Shitheads packs a flinty punch; and paradoxically heralds a vivid poetic talent. A must-see.
Casting Director Saffeya Shebli, Puppetry Co-Design & Fabrication Dulcie best, Production manager Marius Ronning, Company Manager Mica Taylor, Lead Producer Hannah Lyall, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson, Puppetry Fabrication Nick Barnes, Assistant Director Mayaan Haputantri, Flutes Andy Findon, Costumer Supervisor Evelien Can Camp, Stage Manager Catriona McHugh, DSM Mary O’Hanlon, Stage Manager Placement Cas Cassidy.
