Writers: Mary Higgins and Ell Potter
Director: Sammy J. Glover
The Last Show Before We Die is a very peculiar show, peculiar in all the senses of the word. It is strange, it is unexpected, it is different. Two performers are discovered on stage being dead, mummified in old tights and the occasional knee pad. They re-animate, they dance, they sing, they voice-sync to a series of recorded interviews that swim out of the complex sound design (the singular and beautifully executed work of sound designer and musical director Tom Foskett-Barnes) and they engage the audience for a breathless hour in what feels like the arguments they had when their relationship was ending.
The show stipulates that it deals with ‘zombies, heartbreak, and tenacious cockroaches’ in a ‘darkly delightful exploration of endings’, and that seems fair. It is delightful, it is dark, it does feature unkillable cockroaches, and it is unsettling, but in a wry, amusing, entertaining way.
When Ell Potter sings it is also quite beautiful. It does sometimes feel like eavesdropping. The sound design features interviews with midwives and grief counsellors, with old people contemplating their own mortality in an admirably open and pragmatic way, with recovering addicts, with a range of subjects who have looked at the beginning and the ending of things.
The voice-overs are sometimes accompanied by lip-synching, sometimes by deliberately galumphing unison dance, and sometimes left to speak for themselves. They all feed into a show that is somewhat chaotic, but out of which emerge some telling points, something resembling truth.
The most poignant moments of the show, however, are the bickering and rows and irritations that enliven most long-term relationships, however loving, and would appear, in this case, to presage a final break-up. That the couple has been performing the piece since at least last August means that the ending is on long-term hold, which may be the point – zombie relationship maintained in an undead state by the need to keep performing the ending, very meta.
The performers are engaging and easy to sympathise with, the performances are entertaining and surprising, and the whole show makes for a thought-provoking evening, albeit sometimes hard to process. Presumably, Ell Potter and Mary Higgins will now go their separate ways. Hopefully, that will make for twice as many provocative evenings of strange joy.
Runs until 27 January 2024
