If the end of the world is a party, I want these two feral slugs to be our hosts. Fever-dreamed by Canadian clowning duo Creepy Boys, this absurd existential rave is brilliantly smart and beautifully stupid.
Wriggling on to the stage in sleeping bags with puffy vulval gaps for their faces and arms, Sam Kruger and SE Grummett insist, with increasing desperation, that this is a show about nothing. No serious topic will be tackled here. Not gun violence, not climate change, not gender identity. Creepy Boys want to take those heavy, stressful “somethings” and stomp on them while we dance to techno and watch a soothing puppet show instead. When the eggshell-ridden world outside is so hard to navigate, don’t we deserve some smooth-brained blankness? Like slugs: the ultimate nothing.
But sticking to this nothingness proves difficult. Whenever the pair stray into a topic that threatens to be “a something” they retreat, flailing into a cesspit of panic that they’ve ruined the show. Stripped down to bright, tight plastic bibs and free-wheeling genitals, they frantically cover their close-calls with sweaty, delirious misdirections of our attention: Joni Mitchell puppetry; live animations; a two-headed horse. As it becomes harder to stay in the safe zone, every word, body part and casually shoved-in-your-face gun becomes riddled with unavoidably political connotations.
The pair admit their work is “a little bit niche and mostly gross” but this howl of a show uses an anarchic, DIY aesthetic to cloak innovative design and complex Derridian concepts. What begins as an effort to distract from the doom-scroll mentality devolves into a critical analysis of the absurdities we accept as the norm. In a world so unruly, theirs seems the only sane response.