ajhlovestheatre

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE

created and performed by Adam Scott-Rowley

co-created by Joseph Prowen and Tom Morley

Southwark Playhouse Borough, London – until 4 May 2024

https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/you-are-going-to-die/

“To die will be an awfully big adventure” so said J M Barrie in his perennially popular fantasy Peter Pan. There’s something of the boy who refused to grow up about Adam Scott-Rowley’s unique, shape-shifting creation in this bracingly original piece of theatre, that embraces, explores, reveres and often blows a raspberry in the face of human mortality.

Naked, unkempt and crudely painted, there’s also something of the clown, the shaman, the tragedian, and the unreconstructed Northern club circuit comedian about Scott-Rowley. He’s by turns inviting, threatening, charming and utterly magnetic. The nakedness isn’t for titillation but to give a sense of the primal about this sort-of apocalyptic solo vaudeville that is sometimes too esoteric to be fully comprehensible but is more often hypnotic and surprisingly hilarious. The lone toilet on stage, and which is the only set we get, feels indicative of the show’s attitude to existence….as though this is where humanity is heading. It’s a funny conceit, but also a nihilistic one.

Although male genitalia are clearly on display, Scott-Rowley is a curiously androgynous figure for much of the performance, a sort of conduit and representative of humanity in all its squally, plaintive, anxious imperfection. You Are Going To Die seems calculated to unsettle, amuse and baffle in equal measure, and it succeeds.

This was a sell out sensation at Edinburgh and the Vaults festival, and it’s not hard to see why. Scott-Rowley’s astonishing performance is augmented only by the aforementioned toilet, Matt Cater’s evocative, majestic lighting design and a doom-laden sound score. It’s simultaneously simple and hugely challenging. Prepare to laugh a lot, gasp in sheer astonishment…and take part in the most ribald audience singalong you’ve ever heard.

About an hour of this level of intensity and insanity is probably about as much as anybody can cope with, but it really is a hugely rewarding piece of theatre. And even its detractors can’t cry emperors new clothes…as he’s all too aware that he isn’t wearing any. Strangely life-enhancing stuff, for all its desolation and shock value.