Theatre / Reviews
Review: Creepy Boys: SLUGS, The Wardrobe Theatre – ‘Spectacular, absurdist, surrealist, rage-fuelled, hilarious – and furiously honest’
It’s 2026, you’re a young theatremaker and you want to write a show. So what’s the theme? Well, in a world of ‘issues’, take your pick – the panoply of topics facing us ranges from Autism to Zelenskyy and everything in between.
But what if you should decide to write a show about Nothing? Yes, ‘nothing’, that rare gap of space and time when most people pick up their phones and begin auto-scrolling, for fear they may not exist for a moment or two.
This is the loose – exceptionally loose – premise of SLUGS, a two-person show of spectacular, absurdist, surrealist, rage-fuelled nothingness, an hilarious and satirical howl against the bland and the beige of the age, and a rallying call for anyone overwhelmed by the constant pressure to ‘do’, to ‘be something’; to have to claim an identity just because everyone else is.
Known as the Creepy Boys, writers and performers Sam Kruger and SE Grummett are American and Canadian respectively and from the off their philosophy of “a little bit niche but mostly gross” is taken to ever greater extremes.
Arriving as the eponymous slugs, they soon discard their sleeping-bag disguises and come out as a weird mash up of disco queens, snarky ranters, shape-shifters and social commentators – a kind of Devo meets Studio 54 meets South Park.
It’s the latter that asserts its influence most strongly. If Matt Stone and Trey Parker were gay and trans twentysomethings, this is the kind of show they’d write.
The boundaries are pushed to unnerving limits (please don’t accept candy from Sam, and if you do, try to look into his eyes and nowhere else), there is sketchy, insane puppetry and a host of biting, banging songs. In fact, if this show were to be subtitled ‘The Revenge of Terrance and Phillip’, it would be of no surprise at all to seasoned South Park watchers.
Too many great moments to mention pepper this show. There is a riff on horses, which eventually descends into the most absurd pseudo-therapy bullshit I’ve ever heard. There is a ukelele hooked up to a fuzzbox. There is a bean-eating gross-out scene, and the placing of googly plastic eyes on body parts that really shouldn’t have googly eyes placed upon them.
Or should they? In a world where pretty much everyone has gone nuts but takes great pains to hide it, SLUGS rips into the insanity of our times with verve, gusto and wit. Thank the Lord or whoever for a furiously honest show that holds a mirror up to humanity and shows us who we truly are.
Creepy Boys: SLUGS (age recommendation 18+) is at The Wardrobe Theatre on February 24-26 at 7.30pm. Check www.thewardrobetheatre.com for tickets, and follow @thecreepyboys for updates and future events.
All photos: courtesy of Sam Kruger and S. E. Grummett
Read next:
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
