Martin Scorcese once said “Your job is to get your audience to care about your obsessions” and for me nothing could be more true of Javaad Alipoor’s much acclaimed fringe festival feature The Believers Are But Brothers. A play about political extremism, digital technology and male violence, it formed part of HOME’s Orbit Festival, a collection of innovative new work that seek to explore today’s world.
I can close my eyes and still hear the baseline thumping, the monotonous sounds that accompany the spoken words, unrelenting, one after the other, delivered with ferocious ferocity at a speed that makes my brain struggle to keep up. It is incessant, persistent, unremitting, unyielding, remorseless, an undercurrent of words, sounds and light that is continually pushing me deeper under water, and as I come up for air, I am dragged back down, drowning in the myriad that is this bewildering concoction from Kieran Hurley. Heads Up.
Taking your seat to the latest offering from Sh!t Theatre, Letters from Windsor House, you are immediately hurled into the show. Main players, Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit, are already on stage, adorned with requisite trademark greasepaint, sat on a sofa, drink in hand, listening to 80s synth rock cheese classic ‘Alone’ by Heart.