★★★★★

“anarchic, brilliant, and utterly unmissable”

In a theatrical landscape where so much political commentary is derivative, predictable, woolly and yet didactic, Sh!t Theatre’s Evita Too achieves something remarkable. It’s genuinely original, subversive, intelligent and screamingly funny. Writers and performers Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole have crafted a riotous comedy and searing, thought-provoking political critique, wrapped in the story of Isabel Perón.

As the world’s first female president, Isabel Perón ascended to power in Argentina after the death of her husband, Juan. Yet, she has been scrubbed from the history books.

The show’s premise is brilliant. Discovering that Isabel Perón is still alive, the duo travel across Argentina and Spain in search of the mysterious recluse. They attempt to write a musical about her to rival Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita – which glorified Juan Perón’s previous wife Eva whilst rendering his second wife, Isabel invisible. What emerges is part travelogue, part history lesson, part existential crisis. Isabel’s story is unpacked through a collage of video (including scenes in a Perón-themed bar where staff have never heard of Isabel), original songs, puppetry, and slapstick. The design by Zoē Hurwitz and lighting design by Dan Carter-Brennan are pitch perfect.

What makes Evita Too so compelling is its refusal to offer simple narratives. Isabel isn’t presented as a wronged heroine waiting for rehabilitation. She had death squads, after all, and her eighteen-month presidency was marked by economic and political disaster. The audience is trusted to draw its own conclusions.

Under Ursula Martinez’s assured direction and stage managed by Rose Hockaday, the deliberately lo-fi aesthetic becomes a strength. Biscuit and Mothersole perform with infectious energy, shifting between comedy, documentary, and genuine pathos. Music is seamlessly integrated into the show by John Biddle (Composition and Music Production) and Jonathan Mitra (Music Assistant and Track Producer).

The brief, unnecessary and irrelevant nudity at the beginning feels gratuitous and won’t be to everyone’s taste. The remaining material is stronger without it. But this is a minor blemish on an otherwise exceptional evening. Evita Too is clever in the best sense – laugh-out-loud funny whilst addressing troubling questions about who gets remembered and why. It’s the sort of show that leaves you thinking for days afterwards, whilst also providing an absolute blast in the moment.

Evita Too is anarchic, brilliant, and utterly unmissable. Produced by Judith Dimant Productions and supported by the Southbank Centre, this is theatre that matters.

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★

“it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can”

About midway through her performance at the Southbank Centre, Carolina Bianchi climbs onto a white table, closes her eyes and falls asleep. This is not feigned sleep, or naturally incurred exhaustion: Bianchi has taken a sedative, known in Brazil, her native country, as ‘Goodnight Cinderella’, a date rape drug which will render her unconscious for the rest of the performance.

The first chapter of Bianchi’s ‘Cadela Forca’ (Bitch Force) Trilogy, The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella is a relentless, harrowing exploration of rape, femicide, and their intersection with female performance art. Addressing the audience in a white suit with a microphone, Bianchi walks us through a legacy of violence, from the dismembered young woman and twisted moral of Giovanni Baccaccio’s ‘La historia de Nastagio degli Onesti’, to the emulative real-life torture and killing of Eliza Samudio at the behest of the now released footballer Bruno Fernandes de Souza.

Bianchi introduces herself as writer/director of the piece, speaking in Portuguese with accompanying subtitles, paintings and photographs projected onto the white screen behind her. But she is not the protagonist: the play is, as she describes it, a ‘resurrection’ of the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca, who was raped and murdered while hitchhiking through the Balkans and the Middle East in a wedding dress for her project ‘Brides On Tour’.

In her attempts to understand Pippa Bacca’s motivation, to finish the story wiped from her camera by the man who killed her, Bianchi does not seek to simply martyr, aggrandise or condemn. She resents the performative fragility of the white bride, she is biting in her rebuke of the idiocy of blind faith, but at other times she calls out desperately to Bacca, as if to a lover. Once she takes the Goodnight Cinderella, there is unbearable tension in anticipating her eventual collapse. We will her desperately to unearth something, to rest on some finite interpretation of Bacca’s sacrifice before she falls unconscious.

What comes next begets a different kind of anxiety, as Bianchi’s sleeping body is placed in the care of the rest of the company, Cara de Cavalo, the white screen and any through-line narrative falls away to reveal a black stage, a black car and an atemporal, nightmarish second segment. The audience are left in vulnerable freefall, unable to anticipate the next confrontation, the next recounted horror.

The company explores themes of voyeurism, sexuality and perversion through a combination of physical theatre, poetry and dance. The car, unnerving in its still, vacuum-like blackness, becomes the site of simulated violence, sex and invasion. Although Bianchi is indebted to the female performance artists before her, not only Pippa Bacca, but Regina Jose Galindo, whose piece ‘La Siesta’ became the inspiration for her ingestion of the date rape drug – the performance, even while she lies unconscious, watched, undressed, manipulated by the company, is revealed to be arrestingly personal.

It’s a play that determinedly asks more questions than it answers: Can art borne from trauma be restorative, or are we sticking fingers deeper into open wounds? When do women breach the boundary of acceptable risk with their art? Would this question ever be asked of men? In its gratuitous descriptions and depictions of sexual violence it demands us to bear witness to our own perversion: it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can.

Bianchi’s performance insists that a rape cannot be tied up in a lesson, or the full circle of healing; it is a tumorous, insidious thing. “Decipher me or I will devour you,” Bianchi recalls as the false dichotomy of the Sphinx in Oedipus Rex. It feels as if by watching the performance, we witness Bianchi, in the throes of cognizance, being eaten alive.

Tag Archives: Southbank

EVITA TOO

★★★★★

Purcell Room

EVITA TOO

Purcell Room

★★★★★

“anarchic, brilliant, and utterly unmissable”

EVITA TOO

Purcell Room

Reviewed on 11th December 2025

by Elizabeth Botsford

Photography by Ali Wright

EVITA TOO

EVITA TOO

EVITA TOO

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

★★★★

Queen Elizabeth Hall

THE BRIDE AND THE GOODNIGHT CINDERELLA

Queen Elizabeth Hall

★★★★

“it finds the core of you and squeezes as hard as it can”