ajhlovestheatre

WHAT IF THEY ATE THE BABY?

written and performed by Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland

Kings Head Theatre, London – until 7 April 2024

https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/what-if-they-ate-the-baby

New York based multi-disciplinary performers Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland caused a sensation at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival with their Beckett meets hoedown mini extravaganza And Then The Rodeo Burnt Down, which subsequently played a short London season last year at the Kings Head Theatre’s original home on Upper Street. Now the fearless but weirdly charming are twosome are back with their latest, this time at the NEW Kings Head and playing in rep with their acclaimed earlier show. What If They Ate The Baby? feels slightly more immediately accessible than it’s sister show perhaps but shares the same weirdly haunting mixture of unease and delight.

It feels like Pinter filtered through a prism composed of pop art, commedia dell’arte and Doris Day. Rice and Roland play 1950s all American housewives, perky, poised but with clownish and queer overtones. What begins as a send-up of perfect Wisteria Lane-ish suburban lives (the returning of an empty casserole dish sparks a jagged ballet of suppressed aggression and one-upmanship) devolves into a fascinating examination of the extremes of emotion, despair and frustration that can lurk under an apparently civilised surface. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny but with edges of wildness and melancholia that trouble and intrigue.

This -the 1950s- being the era of the McCarthy witch hunts, the show also suggests life under surveillance, as the women obliquely refer to a neighbour who’s been taken away for questioning. It isn’t belaboured but it’s quietly powerful, speaking equally to our own time, a point underlined by the frenetic, jagged dances performed at intervals to contemporary(ish) hip hop and disco. It also lends a frisson of urgency to the women’s covert sexual relationship, and even intimations of cannibalism.

Roland and Rice are sensational: athletic, wry, specific, and able to turn on a dime between kookie cuteness, smiling passive aggression and what looks like genuine fear. At the outset, Roland is sweet, almost puppyish and Rice is more sassy and sophisticated but they switch up attitudes and moods with every change of lighting. They’re clowns, they’re dancers, they’re bloody good actresses and they are charming agitators with a healthily iconoclastic theatrical vision.

There are moments during the hour long performance where it’s not entirely clear what they’re getting at, and anybody who likes linear storytelling and conventional play-making might find this frustrating. Ultimately though, it’s adventurous and playful, confrontational but also deeply charming. I really liked its scattershot unruliness and moments of surprising delicacy. Highly original, and well worth a look.