The Shitheads review – Primal urges emerge in hilarious prehistoric oddity | stage

toLove is expressed with a thumb licking down the forehead in Jack Nichols’s dazzling, unpredictable debut play. Wild, gentle, and downright bizarre, The Shitheads take us back tens of thousands of years, to a time when survival required good aim with your hand axe, and being sensitive was no good.

First humans Claire (Jacoba Williams, slippery and wild) and Greg (Johnny Kahn, puppyishly excited) meet up to hunt for the elk (a beautiful, tattered creature designed by Finn Caldwell and piloted by Scarlett Wildrink, who is completely alive — until he’s not). They have never met anyone like the other, and both are in awe of their opposing perceptions of time and the future, of life and death. Worth a thumb wipe.

David Byrne and Anisha Srinivasan direct the film with a thirst for blood and a relish in the hilarious prehistoric weirdness. The interactions between the characters are raw and wide-eyed, a sense of wonder accompanying their frank idiosyncrasies. Through loquacious and often simplistic speech, Nichols builds a world based on spears and seeds while encapsulating the greatness of what it means to dream, listen, and fight for your survival.

Claire grows up in a cave to protect her eager little sister Lisa, who if left to hunt anything bigger than a rabbit would flatten in seconds (played by Annabelle Smith with restrained energy), and their father (Peter Clements, wonderfully menacing), a sick man who built his girls’ worlds on other people’s myths, the “idiot” out there. He says they can’t talk. They are stupid. He says their dreams become yours if you eat them. But here is Greg telling a story to Claire and deconstructing her reality. And here comes Danielle (Amy Tredrea, strong and wary), Greg’s partner, descending into Claire’s cave.

Opting for wild imagination over precision, Anna Reed’s design deftly fuses red-dusted cave paintings with armchairs, lamps and bones dangling down as decor. The story seems to escape the confines of this stone house, whose grandeur demands its ugliness. Discovered through the Royal Court’s open submissions system, The Shitheads showcases the joy of taking greater risks on our stages. The ending might benefit from trimming, but this brutal story rises with untamed life.