Desperate Men: A Double Bill of Desperateness – Slapstick & Slaughter – the show/Washed Up – the film

One of the UK’s most versatile and inventive outdoor arts companies, Desperate Men have a 39-year track record of creating original, challenging, and accessible theatre. Risk-taking and innovative, the company through theatrical interventions and comic interaction connect with all sorts of people in all sorts of places.

Slapstick & Slaughter – Two men recklessly attempt to confront the absurdity of war in just 40 minutes, using their bodies, their voices and the surrealist toolbox of DADAism. Playful, physical and blackly comedic, Slapstick & Slaughter examines how the barbaric chaos of World War One manifested itself in the nihilistic, nonsensical art that grew from it. This show splatters big ideas on a small canvas, exploring art’s reaction to the war’s wholesale destruction of lives, the old order and old hypocrisies and finding echoes in equally absurd modern conflicts. Washed Up – A bleakly comic study of a creative relationship in crisis. What drives two veterans of outdoor arts to keep making vital theatre when some days they are barely on speaking terms? The creative mechanics of Desperate Men’s fractious but fruitful partnership are laid bare, as they reflect on personal and collective mortality, ecological precarity, and their unique legacy of desperation. Winner of a Gold Award at the Spotlight Documentary Film Awards 2018.