That’s my next hotdog ruined. Shakespeare’s “too solid flesh” is squeezed into a sausage-shaped form in Mary Higgins and Ell Potter’s inventively guilt-trippy new show. Leaping wildly from Hamlet, this outrageous, confrontational performance-activism layers hooting comedy with world-ending dread as Mary (a vegan) attempts to persuade Potter (nicknamed “the sausage queen” by their dad) to change their meat-eating ways.
Transposing Hamlet’s existential questions to the future survival of humanity via the meat industry’s impact on the planet, Higgins takes on the role of our stubborn, sauntering prince, seeking vengeance for the ghost of a poor, slaughtered, strangely seductive pig. Suave and silly, Potter is both ghost and Gertrude, the latter reading madness into the truth only her son is brave enough to face.
Easy laughs are won through winking Shakespearean parody, but the further off-piste the show goes, the more Ham swerves what we already know and ignore, and jolts us into looking anew. Through naked dancing, a pet funeral, and a dom/sub relationship with a meat-eating member of the audience, this anarchic duo directs our avoidant gaze to our own impact on the planet. Though Higgins is on higher moral ground, Potter’s role is essential, with their effusive love of food stopping this from being purely haranguing – both for them and us – and twirling it into a genuine personal dilemma.
This isn’t about the murders of animals, Higgins says, but the suicide of the human race. (It’s also a bit about the murders of animals; they’re not afraid to show brutal, scarring images.) Inescapably a little preachy, the show is also riotously funny – until the very end when footage of recent forest fires blazes behind the performers. The clips start across the ocean and get closer: to Europe; the UK; Arthur’s Seat. It’s no longer a question of what might, or might not be.
