Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl

Imagine the entire world has died and the only woman to survive is the most exasperating person in your office. With an otherwise entirely empty office space, one would think Jerry (Geoff Sobelle) and Rhoda (Charlotte Ford) were in working on the weekend. Except they’re not. Featuring microwave food, taxidermy and a coveted bag of crisps, this comedic foray into the realms of Doomsday and apocalypse is outstanding.

Sobelle plays the nerdy, anxious and OCD Jerry to a perfect fault. Refusing to believe that the world has ended, he continues to occupy his time swatting flies and avoiding Rhoda, the man-eating, hunch-back secretary. Neurotic and absurd, one wonders how long they have been surviving in the office and how much longer it will be before the inevitable occurs.

St Stephen’s church has been transformed into Commercial Foods and the visual set is INCREDIBLE. The taxidermy, puppeteered and controlled by Jessica Grindstaff and Erik Sanko, are silent, skin-crawling characters, popping out of drawers and under desks when you least expect them to do so. They are so disturbing, one laughs instead of freaking out; literally, the otherwise silent audience would burst into nervous laughter every time a stuffed animal came on stage.

Sobelle and Ford, alongside a very talented sound designer Nick Kourtides and, of course, the taxidermy, have created a maddeningly hilarious piece of work from New York's Barrow Street theatre. The outlandish and amazingly annoying Jerry and Rhoda build up the storyline to an unbelievably surreal and visually stunning finale and, despite the high price of the ticket, this is worth every penny.

Flesh and Blood and Fish and Fowl
Traverse Theatre at St Stephen’s
19:00, 5-29 Aug