When someone you love dies, the grief can be almost unbearable, but there can also be a sense of something valuable in the mix – as if a veil has been yanked back so you can momentarily see life, and what matters about it, clearly. When I’ve had those experiences, I remember thinking: “Please let me hold on to this insight, if or when the grief fades.” But you never do: daily life, and its less profound priorities, take over again at the wheel.
This then is some of the value of a new show by the always extraordinary Sh!t Theatre, entitled Or What’s Left of Us: it pulls the veil back again. Becca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have both experienced grievous loss – of a parent in Mothersole’s case, and of a partner in Biscuit’s: Adam Brace, who was also the duo’s director, before he shockingly died last year. The show finds them uncertain, in light of that, whether they can even be Sh!t Theatre any more. So out go their usual white-painted faces, the video material, the alt.documentary zeal – and in comes total absorption in folk music, as a lens through which to consider death and bereavement, as generation upon generation have had to live with it (because what alternative is there?) before.
