Review: Butchered, VAULT Festival – Everything Theatre

Review: Butchered, VAULT Festival

There may hardly be a greater location for Expial Atrocious‘ Butchered than the dark, damp and dingy Vaults below Waterloo station. To top it all off, they play in VAULT Festival’s ‘Pit’ venue.

Butchered is underway because the doorways open. Loud dramatic music with extremely efficient sound results accompany Master Sausage (Ezre Holland) and Apprentice (Nic Lawton) as they undergo the repetitive routine of constructing sausage over and again and again. Their expressions present the boredom on the mind-numbing routine, weariness with the repetitive duties, but in addition some pleasure in a job nicely achieved. Their bodily theatre and choreography are very good, timed completely with the soundtrack and with one another. As an viewers we will image the meat, the blending, the chopping, and the grinding; it’s virtually a shock that we will’t see literal sausages. As the doorways shut and the lights go down, Lawton and Holland preserve going at this monotonous routine and push it, intentionally, just a bit too lengthy. It is an announcement of intent for the themes they’re about to handle.

The story then begins, with Master Sausage’s routine being disrupted. The individuals ‘above’ have despatched the Apprentice as it’s ‘time’. Master Sausage shouldn’t be one bit completely satisfied about this, however for the reason that change seems to carry some deeper that means, units out to point out Apprentice simply easy methods to make the sausage, inexperienced mouldy bits and all. Expial Atrocious mines the disparity between the long-serving, overwhelmed down Master Sausage and the brand new Apprentice for lots of comedy, as the 2 grapple to know one another. Apprentice has come into this new job with a brilliant and bubbly angle, bringing desires and a want to be inventive, whereas the one pleasure Master Sausage has left is an virtually euphoric response to the meat grinder. While we by no means see the grinder, Holland’s look of adoration because it does its processing is incredible.

But what do you do when your desires are dashed and also you face the truth that you’re a tiny cog in a large machine? That the individuals above, metaphorically (and actually on this case) don’t care about you, your desires or your wellbeing, and are keen to make this very clear to you? It is not any shock that the 2 employees are named just for their roles. In this place there isn’t a area for something aside from course of; definitely not artwork or creativity. There is not any area for desires or artwork in a job like this, and it will likely be overwhelmed out of you rapidly.

Every beat in Butchered goes slightly longer than you suppose it ought to and slightly longer than you need it to. It is a spectacularly efficient trick to stress simply how repetitive and boring the duties are and move a few of that discomfort straight onto the viewers, unnerving us just a bit and bringing us all the way down to the extent of the kitchen employees. Special point out should go to the contribution of sound design all through. The music is darkish and dramatic and creates a sense of strain. The sound results are merely excellent, with the slicing of meat and the sound of meat going right into a bowl guaranteeing that the viewers is totally immersed on this dingy kitchen

Expial Atrocious makes use of a blinding mixture of physicality, absurdity and a pitch-black script to move the viewers to Master Sausage’s kitchen the place desires come to work, eat, sleep after which die.

Written, directed and produced by: Expial Atrocious

Butchered performs at VAULT Festival till 29 January. Further data and tickets might be discovered right here.

You can learn our current interview with Nic and Ezre about Butchered right here.