Review: 50 Ways to Kill a Slug, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘Visceral, evocative and deeply human’

“In a pristinely manicured garden, amidst the bucolic borders, lurk two shameful pests. These horny slimeballs just want to chomp, chew, spit, live, lust and die freely in an ever more hostile home”

The acclaimed nonverbal multi-sensory show 50 Ways To Kill A Slug opened at The Wardrobe Theatre last night, to an audience that did not know what had hit it.

Makers Dre Spisto and Joana Nastari have devised an anarchic love-letter to nature’s underdog, and in doing so have ironically created something deeply human.

Joana Nastari and Dre Spisto in 50 Ways to Kill a Slug – photo: courtesy of the artists

What’s it about? That’s like trying to explain the colour of music or the taste of regret. The show is unruly, in your face and defiant. 50 Ways has a viscerality and an urgency that is difficult to put across using words.

The two performers – both playing slugs – essentially roll around nude in slime and enact modernity’s horrors: doom-scrolling, office work, the mundanity of letter-sending. What the show never is, is predictable.

50 Ways to Kill a Slug promotional shot for PAPAYA Fest – photo: Stephen Daly

For a work that I comprehend as fundamentally an act of resistance, 50 Ways manages – I think through its focus on the sacred nature of rest in the context of capitalism – to evoke legitimate tenderness and a felt softness.

The show is riotous, funnier than probably you’d expect for a piece whose emotional origin is likely anger, and about as suggestive and evocative as theatre can possibly be. The squelching, spitting, biting, slapping – I found myself grinning, transfixed, whilst some around me heaved. If theatre’s purpose is to make us feel something, 50 Ways To Kill A Slug is the gold standard.

Photo: Joana Nastari and Dre Spisto

There is something incredibly evocative about bodies laid bare, some strange combination of vulnerability and power. Immediately reminiscent of punk feminist company RashDash, I find myself more grateful – more awestruck – by performers who have chosen to incorporate nudity into their work. I suppose it feels as though they have given more of themselves to the art. Perhaps that is the sort of thinking this work aims to challenge. Either way, as somebody whose relationship to their own body has been coloured by trauma, I have a terrible habit of welling up just about every time nudity features in theatre.

In closing, then, 50 Ways To Kill A Slug is a show which pretends to be disgusting but manages to be beautiful, pretends to alienate an audience who fall in love with the work, pretends to be a silly show about slugs but is a serious show about humans. I can’t begin to explain how much I enjoyed it. I may well go again before this run is through.

 

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A post shared by The Wardrobe Theatre (@thewardrobetheatre)

For more information, follow @joananastari and @drespisto.

For tickets to all upcoming events at The Wardrobe Theatre, visit www.thewardrobetheatre.com.

Main photo: Joana Nastari and Dre Spisto

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