Writer: Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland
Directors: Xhloe Rice, Natasha Roland and Tom Costello
A blast of Britney and two figures thrashing about in the dark set the tone before a word is spoken, and from that opening beat, Bigfoot Ripped My Dog In Half I Saw It never lets up.
Xhloe and Natasha, the Triple Fringe First-winning duo, return to Soho Theatre with a show about two teenagers in a superstitious Appalachian town whose fake Bigfoot sightings take a darker turn when a neighbour’s dog is found torn apart. What starts as a prank curdles into something closer to mass hysteria, and the pair uses the premise to probe how easily a community reaches for monsters rather than look at what is actually broken. The plot itself is kept at arm’s length here deliberately, since so much of the show’s pleasure lies in not knowing where it’s headed next.
What is immediately clear is the sheer control on display. Between them, the two performers conjure an entire town’s worth of characters, flipping accents and physicalities with a speed that borders on athletic. The switches between characters come thick and fast, each one landing cleanly enough to get its own laugh before the next arrives.
Props are assembled and struck constantly throughout, in full view, and rather than breaking the spell, it becomes part of the show’s rhythm, a kind of stagecraft-as-choreography that never once slows the pace. Invisible props, mimed with total commitment, land some of the biggest laughs of the night, drawing genuine gasps of delight from an audience clearly not expecting mime to carry so much weight.
The two performers work as a genuine double act, one frequently pitched at hysterical extremes while the other reacts in mounting disbelief, and the contrast keeps the comic engine running even when the material edges toward the sinister.
This push and pull between the two energies does much of the heavy lifting, giving the show its shape even as the characters around them multiply and blur. Sound design deserves particular credit. Effects land in exact sync with the physical comedy, and the music throughout does as much storytelling as the dialogue, underscoring beats and punctuating jokes with an unusual level of precision for a fringe production. A running thread of a secret withheld from the audience is teased out patiently across the hour, giving the piece a forward pull that keeps the laughter from ever going slack.
At 65 minutes, the show doesn’t overstay its welcome, though the sheer density of characters and quick-fire switches occasionally means a beat or two is thrown away before it can land fully. It’s a minor complaint against a production moving this fast and this confidently, and one that barely registers against how consistently the audience is kept laughing.
This is a show split down the middle, equal parts silly and unsettling, sharpened by Tom Costello’s co-direction and Angelo Sagnelli’s lighting, which finds real menace in the shadows even at the show’s silliest. Xhloe and Natasha handle both registers with the same nimble precision.
Runs until 26 September 2026
