Assessment: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, Southwark Playhouse

Assessment: YOU ARE GOING TO DIE, Southwark Playhouse

YOU ARE GOING TO DIE is written and carried out by Adam Scott-Rowley with a way of gravitas that doesn’t all the time appear merited. Definitely, the supply is bodily expressive, as he chokes and gags, splutters and spits to get his phrases out – or not, as is usually the case. Any void is crammed along with his stylistic bodily supply, which is impressively daring and demanding as he writhes and wriggles, nearly convulsing at factors to convey the sensation inside.

The play opens with Scott-Rowley sitting bare on the bathroom, his physique painted in blue and white traces, a torso stained with marks and pictures. Lighting (Matt Cater) is suitably gloomy, suitably clubby, suitably sinister and Scott-Rowley reacts to the relentless beating soundscape, which is all very atmospheric. Slowly he rises from the shithole the place he ponders and engages with recollections of dwelling. Nearly hypnotically, he strikes out and in of a spread of characters, previous, younger, infantile, animalistic, and all through he makes use of bodily type to seize the confused state of existence, even at occasions suggesting a rebirth. Scott-Rowley appears to shed a personality and feelings like a snake sheds its pores and skin – repulsive but watchable, and the phallus connections appear one way or the other very apposite. As he wriggles and writhes throughout the ground at one level, like a worm leaving a path of silky white stains on the bottom we surprise if that’s all that is still of any of us. It’s intelligent, random stuff that confuses, and even when characters’ woes are revisited, it then catches you out like a dream that you simply can not maintain, morphing right into a grotesque nightmare. Scott-Rowley provides an intensely inventive efficiency for certain and clearly the inventive enter from co-creators Tom Morley and Joseph Prowen is important.

They play with regressive and progressive atmospheres, uncertain if they’re liberating, or constraining. They discover the concept of self-knowledge, which at occasions is absorbing and directly uninteresting, actually unedifying in moments; and perhaps life is rather like that. Definitely, vocally Scott-Rowley is adept, switching between vocal ranges to recommend gender, ache, egocentric elation, and kind.

We now have the relatively upmarket vacuous lady contrasting with the northern no bullshit male; the clubman who can inform a spade from a spade however not a dildo from the true factor. They’re exploring a land the place 9 billion folks on Earth haven’t any actual thought the place dwelling is taking them to. However what they and we generally share for sure is loss of life itself: apart from that something goes, as all these lives appear to be heading down the bathroom – at occasions actually.

Nonetheless, there are moments of actual humour, with the lady escaping from the nicely that holds her or our widowed northern ‘nasty bastard’ exploring a sexuality that’s all new to him.

I wouldn’t say it’s enjoyable however relatively curious. As an indulgent, disordered account of man’s insecurities it’s actually dangerously unconventional. Absorbing at occasions, it presents an existential rumination on moments of lives that in the end go down the pan!

reator and co-performed by: Adam Scott-Rowley
Co-created by: Joseph Prowen and Tom Morley
Lighting Design by: Matt Cater
Finale tune composed by: Phil McDonnell

You Are Going To Die performs at Southwark Playhouse till 4 Could. Additional info and bookings avaialble right here.