In Tits and Teeth, Thick and Tight (duo Daniel Hay-Gordon and Eleanor Perry) promise to show an audience their best bits. Presenting favourite pieces from their ten-year history, the pair uses mime, dance, lip-sync and drag to explore famous figures from history.
The audience gets to sigh at a doomed romance between Miss Havisham and Queen Victoria, watch Marlene Dietrich stomp her way through a glam rock number and gasp as a baker’s dozen of Edith Sitwells invade the stage. Part of London International Mime Festival, each piece makes use of elaborate sound design, creating collages of music, interview and film which are lip-synced, danced and mimed to by the performers. There’s a grab-bag of influences including classic films, disco, ballet and EastEnders.
It’s a camp night, revelling in artifice with a fluid and performative sense of identity. This is clearest in the drag numbers. Hay Gordon plays a terrifying Miss Havisham with the creaking theatricality of an ageing automaton whilst Perry’s vigorous, disco-dancing Rasputin displays more than a long beard to please the Russian Queen.
What makes Tits and Teeth impressive, is that while it delights in the surprising, the silly and the camp, the pieces become surprisingly thoughtful and emotional. When the flock of Edith Sitwells enters, each wears a shapeless dress and a ludicrous fascinator that looks like bed-head. It’s a funny image and we hear an interviewer asking her about her unique dress sense. This leads on to sound-clips of Sitwell talking about the difficulty of being different and how her father humiliated her in every way he could. We listen to the dignity of her speech and it is matched with the dignified bearing of the on-stage Sitwells, performed by the Corali Dance Company, who are performers with learning difficulties. At the end, they carry a cardboard cutout of Edith Sitwell’s head, the fascinator transformed into the plume of a Roman Centurion’s helmet, a symbol of the pain of being different and the strength it can develop.
The final skit of the night, Cage and Paige, starts of with a ludicrous premise; what if John Cage and Elaine Paige collaborated on a project. At first, the focus is on Cage’s philosophical musings on the pleasure he takes in sound, contrasted with Paige’s idiosyncratic laugh. However, as the piece progresses, Cage and Paige begin to speak the same language. Cage paraphrases Immanuel Kant, saying; “There are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter”. Where Perry starts out lip-syncing Cage’s lines and Hay-Gordon lip-syncing Paige’s laugh, the two start moving the roles between them so that Cage and Paige become one and the piece becomes a celebration of sound.
Tits and Teeth may grab an audience with its outrageous visions of historical figures magnified into caricature but will linger because of the care and affection those caricatures are given. It’s a memorable night, delivering on the promise of ‘variety, splendour and stupidity’.
Runs until 28 January 2023
The London International Mime Festival continues to 5 February 2023
The Reviews Hub Score
These teeth shine
