No, not that Windsor House. This one is on an estate in the not-so-Green Lanes area of North London – fag end of Finsbury Park to you and me, guv. And here we are! On-screen, we see the glorious exterior of the block of council flats, and the wasteland around it, with an estate agent sales-pitch voiceover.
Yep, the Sh!t girls, Louise Mothersole and Becca Biscuit (a punk dole name, if ever I heard one), live here. Yep, they live and work together, with all the strains and stresses that this entails. And yep, in a council flat, although they are private tenants –another problem brewing, as once they’ve worked out that their landlord is illegally sub-letting his council gaff, what to do? Do they shop him to the authorities, which might mean losing their home as they are illegals, or do they keep schtum? The third strand of the show – the one around which all else circles – are all the unopened letters piling up, addressed to people who’ve lived there in Windsor House, and have moved on without bothering to get their mail forwarded. Another ethical dilemma: is it OK to open other people’s post, if it has sat around unclaimed for months by people long moved on? Yes, they decide. They change the names slightly in the telling, but have no qualms about exposing the remains after the departures: Daisy Murray, subscription to National Geographic; Saad Madras, letters from loan companies and the Grosvenor Casino; Rob Jecock, baby catalogues and breast cancer awareness information.
So these three things – the agony and ecstasy of living with someone you love dearly and work with; the appalling housing situation for Londoners, specifically young people on lower incomes who have not a hope in hell of finding somewhere decent to rent at a fair price; and the romance of the lives of others, people you don’t know who have occupied the same space you are now in – are weaved very cleverly and beautifully together into a show that sees the former Total Theatre Award winners graduate from being ‘emerging artists’ into fully blossomed, confident and accomplished writers and performers.
All the usual Sh!t Theatre elements are here: extensive research into real life stories; cocky songs, played and sung with vim and vigour; a lo-tech set and lovingly handmade props (scuzzy sofa, cardboard boxes, whole-body post box costumes, oh yes!). There’s the documentary/mocumentary footage: the estate agent sell of an old mattress flung by a broken fence; the piles of letters on the chest-of-drawers in the hall; a video tour of the area, which includes a high street lined with Poundworlds, a pub called The Happy Man filled with unhappy men, and a fish and chip shop called #Hashtag Fish and Chips. There’s also an element of Cockney Music Hall which is fabulous – pushed to almost-dodgy limits in its Oliver! piss-take of landlord Fagin. Dickensian ain’t in it.
It’s all there, and it all mulches together beautifully. The show is gorgeously written – both in the sense of the spoken text, and the dramaturgy of the piece – and performed with total confidence and showbiz pizzazz.
It is witty and entertaining and political. It is also, in its telling of Louise and Becca’s personal story – told whilst dressed as post boxes, the Sh!ts reading letters to each other – poignant to the point of heartbreak.
Letters to Windsor is presented at Summerhall in association with Show and Tell