Venue: The Box, Assembly George Square
Date: Thursday 27 August
Rating: ★★★★ (4/5)
Reviewed by: Eileen Inglis
Two women sit on deckchairs on a beach. They couldn’t be more different. Shayna is wealthy, glamorous and five-times divorced. Beverley is a working-class mother of twelve boys. They probably would never have spoken to each other, except that Shayna’s pet bird of prey, Benedryl, named after the cough medicine she’s addicted to, shits on Beverley.
It’s as good a way as any to start a friendship.
From there, BIRDS becomes an increasingly surreal and quite bonkers hour as the two women chain-smoke, swap stories and talk about their lives while the world gradually falls apart around them.
Played by Alex Hines and Sarah Stafford, Beverley and Shayna are exaggerated to the point of caricature, with towering wigs, heavy make-up, bikinis and kaftans giving them a kind of heightened, drag-like femininity. Their stories are equally excessive.
Shayna has recently buried nine members of her family after a tragic accident. Beverley is so fed up with her husband that she fantasises about having a grave plot all to herself so she doesn’t have to lie next to him for eternity.
It’s dark, macabre and very funny.
As the temperature rises, birds fall from the sky and eventually skin starts to melt. The pair remain in their deckchairs, smoking and talking. There’s an obvious apocalyptic climate theme, and plenty about our ability to carry on as catastrophe unfolds around us.
But what interested me just as much was the unlikely friendship developing in the middle of it all. Somewhere among the cigarettes, gossip and apparent nonsense, these two women from completely different worlds begin to genuinely like one another. At one point, Beverley invites Shayna to her house. It’s a tiny moment amid all the grotesque chaos, but it says something very recognisable about the accidental way friendships can begin.
BIRDS is absurd, camp and occasionally completely unhinged. But beneath all the chaos is something surprisingly human: two women who probably wouldn’t have chosen each other finding a connection while the world burns around them.
Staged inside a shipping container, it could have been a little too immersive during Edinburgh’s recent hot weather. Luckily, the evening I went was cool; apparently, on warmer days, the container was beginning to feel a bit too much like that burning beach.
