‘The Last Show Before We Die’ is an acid-bright, ideas-heavy live art two-hander that mixes silliness and poignancy and garnered a hell of a lot of buzz at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Now it’s transferred to the Yard to blow off some start-of-year cobwebs.
Clad only in some unflattering bits of torn stocking, creator-performers Mary Higgins and Ell Potter start the show on the floor, laboriously jerk-dancing to their feet, before addressing us for the first time by talking through the more lurid aspects of childbirth. Although it begins with birth, the show is about endings: both generally – there are a selection of pre-recorded interviews on the subject – and specifically: it is nominally prompted by former lovers and housemates Higgins and Potter’s desire to disentangle their lives from each other.
If you’re being reductive you’d call it a sort of leftfield sketch show, as the oddball pair – who look somewhat feral, but are supremely well spoken, and possessed of excellent comic timing – leap between ideas with merry abandon, and only one eye on internal coherency.
Some of the interviews feel a bit fillery and don’t really land, but there’s a deeply moving one with Higgins’s elderly grandfather, apparently conducted just two weeks before his death. It’s gentle and wise and amusingly undercut by his granddaughter's insistence on hopping around doing earsplitting crow impressions during it because she thinks it’s artistic. It’s a very silly moment in a show that can get surprisingly earnest, especially at the end as the pair literally – well, symbolically but there’s actual string – cut the threads binding them to each other.
Higgins and Potter have charm and ideas to spare. They’re also very good at nailing that point in your late twenties when the intensity of student-style houseshares inevitably subsides and you start to take a step back from a life that revolves solely around friends.
I suspect the worked a bit better in the context of the Fringe, where it ran late at night, and probably served as a palette cleanser to audiences who’d been watching more structured work throughout the day.
Sammy J Glover’s production feels like it could benefit from more rigorous dramaturgy to hold its ideas together, and perhaps more actorly performances from Higgins and Potter. Whereas a performer like, say, Lucy McCormick can make you believe she’s having a full-on breakdown, eight shows a week, the duo here are too mannered and mild for their nightly falling out and reconciliation to really feel convincing – there’s a visceral level that ‘The Last Show Before We Die’ should work at, but doesn’t.
But it’s enjoyable all the same. An hour of sweet, funny chaos that feels like a perfect antidote to January jadedness.