Edinburgh review: Letters to Windsor House (Summerhal)
© Claire Haigh
Becca and Louise live in Windsor House: an ex-council flat in Manor House in north London, where pigeons shit and mould sprouts. There’s a psychiatric hospital out back, and people smoke crack in the phonebox out front. At Windsor House, they get a lot of post for other people and, because no-one ever really returns to sender (such a weird idea, "Elvis had to write a song about it"), they’ve decided to start opening it.
Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole are Sh!t Theatre, and their latest work is a lightly ramshackle, very funny piece of documentary theatre, performed with winning, brimming energy. With dodgy home-footage, comedy Lahndan accents, daffy lo-fi costumes, and absurd songs, their aesthetic has considerable scrappy charms – but there’s also a righteous, pulsating anger at the housing crisis at its heart.
You might think the London housing market has gone beyond parody – particularly when they play the marketing video for Woodberry Park, a massive new development of luxury apartments. Yet Sh!t Theatre do further skewer it with their own footage of the area. These developments leer over run-down council blocks, masses of fly-tipping and – not a joke; really not funny at all – the patch of ground by the tube where homeless people put up tents, until the council put up a big fence. The gap between this sky-high, hovering-above-the-filth luxury living and the reality of London’s conflicted streets is bracingly caught in their point-and-shoot wobbly footage. It makes you seethe.
Biscuit and Mothersole are also best mates: they’ve shared houses for six years. Living together, working together, working together on a show about living together… naturally, their relationship – its goofy affection, mutual dependence and laceratingly exposed disapproval – is also woven through Letters to Windsor House. They read bracingly candid love letters to each other, offering an honest portrait of the joy and pain (in the arse) of living with your closest mate. The rest of us may not dress up as postboxes to talk about our feelings, but anyone who’s bonded over mad landlords and maddening neighbours will relate to the particular closeness cohabiting in post-crash housing brings.
When they start opening post, it’s a lark, but also one that provides rich material for their leaping, conjoined imaginations. They speculate wildly about the lives of the previous inhabitants of Windsor House, till a casino loyalty card becomes evidence of membership of the Turkish mafia, and baby milk adverts prove that "Rob Jecock" – names have been slightly, ahem, changed – "is an adult baby." They thoroughly Google stalk these former residents, often with very funny results. Still, even opening letters reminds how economic unfairness tentacles through society: debts spiral in a way that seems cold sweat-inducingly unfair (one HMRC bill, over three years, balloons from £10 to £2,900. Gulp.)
And, in among the letters, seem to be a suspicious number addressed to their landlord… might they be subletting from a dodgy council tenant? And if they are, what should they do about it? Letters to Windsor House briefly tilts at the moral impossibility of metropolitan living in a housing crisis: they acknowledge that people who need council homes should have them, and yet have no desire to leave… This could be probed a little more vigorously, to be honest, given their sharpness elsewhere. But it also serves as yet another reminder that we are stuck in a system that’s absolutely screwed.
Letters to Windsor House is at Summerhall at 1.35pm until 28 August (not 22).
