Review: BIGFOOT RIPPED MY DOG IN HALF I SAW IT, Soho Theatre
Photo credit: Jennifer Forward-Hayter
Before Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It has even started, Soho Theatre is playing an absolute belter of a playlist. Backstreet Boys, Gwen Stefani, Blur's Song 2... sp by the time Xhloe Rice and Natasha Roland appear, everyone's already in the mood to have fun.
The music doesn't stop there. Songs keep popping up at exactly the right moment, sometimes with a lyric that suddenly fits what's happening – Britney Spears singing "I must confess" being one particularly well-timed example. At first, it's another part of the joke. As things get darker though, the music starts telling a story of its own.
And things do get dark. Not immediately, because initially we're dealing with two teenage girls, a truck they shouldn't be driving, and a spectacularly stupid lie about Bigfoot.
Rice and Roland make the girls' friendship immediately believable. They hang out together, dream about escaping their small Appalachian town together, have their own jokes, and finish each other's sentences. There's no lengthy explanation of their history because there doesn't need to be one; they behave like two people who've probably known each other forever.
So when they find themselves in trouble and invent a Bigfoot attack as an excuse, we're in on the joke; we know it's ridiculous. Except it doesn't stay ridiculous for long.
Soon the town is talking about Bigfoot, people are seeing Bigfoot, and every new piece of information seems to become further evidence that Bigfoot must be responsible. We know he isn't real - presumably - but somewhere along the way that certainty becomes less important. We're pulled into town hall meetings and increasingly bizarre discussions, and we're no longer just watching these people get caught up in the story. We're part of the town too.
Rice and Roland populate that town entirely by themselves, and their character work is extraordinary. There's a chain-smoking busybody, a naive and grieving sheriff, a mayor with a comb-over, a grouchy old man with a shotgun, and a government representative who keeps insisting the crisis team will be arriving any moment. There are no costume changes to help us out, yet a voice, an accent, a facial expression, or the smallest physical adjustment is enough. Even when they're swapping between characters at manic speed, there's never any confusion about who we're watching.
That physicality runs through everything they do. They climb over one another, move in unison, and use each other as props and pieces of scenery, yet none of it feels as though it's been inserted to show us how clever they are. It just belongs in this increasingly strange, slightly dreamlike world.
The actual set barely exists. There's a stop sign, which gradually acquires various pieces of Bigfoot, and not much else. That's all they need. Between the performers, the music, and our own imaginations, an entire town appears around it.
And it is funny. Proper, laugh-out-loud funny. Some of that comes from the increasingly eccentric townspeople, some from Rice and Roland's superb comic timing, but much of it is in a script that sounds wonderfully natural. Conversations overlap and bounce between the pair as if they're genuinely happening for the first time, while some of the biggest laughs come from the darkest and strangest things anybody says.
It's easy, then, to become distracted by Bigfoot. Which, eventually, turns out to be rather the point.
Because underneath the sightings, rumours, town meetings, and increasingly elaborate mythology, something else is happening. Small details that barely register at first begin to matter, and what started as two teenagers telling a ridiculous lie starts opening up questions about environmental damage, corruption, fear, and what happens when an explanation is more appealing than the truth.
The clever part is how gradually it gets us there. We're never handed a neat moment where the comedy stops and the Serious Message begins. Bigfoot remains absurd, the characters remain funny, and Rice and Roland keep the whole thing moving at an almost ridiculous pace, but our relationship with the story has changed. We've spent so long enjoying the madness that we've become caught up in it too.
There's something horribly recognisable about a community choosing the explanation it can live with, even as evidence begins pointing somewhere far less comfortable. Truth isn't necessarily the thing people want most. Sometimes they want something that makes sense of their fear. Sometimes they want somebody - or something - they can blame.
And sometimes Bigfoot will do nicely.
That's what makes Bigfoot Ripped My Dog in Half I Saw It more than the wonderfully silly show its title promises. Rice and Roland manage to make it loud, strange, inventive, and properly funny while allowing something much darker to creep in around the edges.
We begin laughing at a ridiculous lie about Bigfoot.
Somewhere along the way, we stop feeling quite so certain that we're the sensible ones.
***** FIve stars
Reviewed by: Lisamarie Lamb
