'Die! Die! Die!' review or 'Time's up?'

'Die! Die! Die!' - Ridiculusmus Theatre

Battersea Arts Centre, 10th May 2019

Written for The Guardian 

Let’s call this endurance clowning. Like all of Ridiculusmus’s shows, Die! Die! Die! is designed to unsettle the audience and help us understand an unfamiliar mental state. Their last show, Give Me Your Love, offered a tiny fraction of the isolation and confusion that haunts PTSD sufferers. Now they want us to experience the frustrations, surprising comic notes and gaping stretching out of time that some encounter in old age. It’s agonising and darkly amusing – the type of show you’ll want to forget but will struggle to shake off.

There are elements of French and Saunders, Waiting for Godot and Roald Dahl’s The Twits and The Witches bundled into this two-person, black-hole comedy. David Woods dons an oversized black suit and looks like a butler recently escaped from his grave. Jon Haynes plays Woods’ wife and wears pearls, a cotton cardigan, a chalky face mask and ludicrous grey wig.

The two enter the stage by a side door, faltering from their first step. With a clock ticking ominously overhead, they take an age to reach the oasis placed in the centre of Romanie Harper’s abandoned set: a shiny wooden table furnished with only a glass of water. When the two walk, it’s as if an invisible force is pulling them backwards. When they talk, it’s in strange squeaky voices and addressed directly to the audience, encouraging laughter, pity, affection, fear. This show is as much about our reaction to old age as about how it feels to get old.

The slow pointless journeys across the stage are first sad, then funny and then sadder still. The bawdy humour, including burps and farts released with great ceremony, prompts giddy – or is it guilty? – laughter. In one brilliant skit, Woods proceeds to consume the entire contents of his pillbox until he eventually chokes on the medicine meant to help him. And later, as a grieving Woods reads aloud a series of barmy condolence letters, as thoughtless as they are thoughtful, pity and laughter rise up as one.