There’s plenty to chew on in the Royal Court’s new play The S***heads – not just raw elk meat and cannibalised brain matter. Though there’s a good amount of that too: for the paleolithic characters that populate Jack Nicholls’ thoughtful debut, acts of barbaric violence are just part of the prosaic everyday.
The S***heads (censorship The Independent’s) transports us to the Stone Age, where we meet a three-person family of cave-dwellers: capable and curious Clare (Jacoba Williams), her ailing father Adrian (Peter Clements), and younger sister Lisa (Annabel Smith), supposedly a teen but with a sort of infantile pluck – think Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St Louis. That she is played by a fully grown woman is but one blithe anachronism in a staging that’s full of them: characters speak in modern English, have modern names, and wear items of modern clothing; the cave set includes a freestanding electrical lamp and a floor compartment with various kitchen items. (A brief reveal of a Sports Direct mug gets one of the biggest laughs of the night.)
