Writer and Director: Sylvia Gardner
There may be some pertinent insights into gender politics in Dead Effing Rebels, but they are submerged so much in abstraction that it’s very difficult to make them out. We sit up eagerly when one character tells off another for their intellectual grandstanding, but then slump back in our seats when the meaningless aphorisms continue. It’s not clear at all what’s going on.
Four workers in white shirts and ties sit around a table while their boss, Mister, informs them of a new task. They are auditors of some kind, and Mister chucks a box full of documents onto the table. They are to sort through the reams of paper in search of misdoings. Something to do with tax, perhaps, although we never really discover what they are searching for.
Every now and then they stop working: not for a coffee break, but for a make-up break. Pulling out lipstick and blusher from little bags and kits, they continue to talk in abstractions, but their conversation is now peppered with bitchy putdowns and ideas about “putting on a face”. But what they are arguing about is elusive. If there is subtext here, it’s way too deep to excavate.
At one point they strut around like revolutionaries, but what they seek to overturn is as obscure as the tax return that they pore over. Mister (a wonderful Kian Standbridge) switches from being their flirty friend to ruthless boss. Perhaps writer Sylvia Gardner is alluding to the different identities we all have to don as we navigate the workspace, public space and the domestic. Perhaps…
The actors do well in delivering their complex lines, seeing as there is no discernible plot to guide them. Gardner, who also directs, has the actors facing each other across a table in the centre of the awkward Barons Court Theatre, with the result that, depending on where you’re sitting, only the backs of Ben Oliver and Rufus Brierley are visible. Indeed, poor Oliver spends most of the time looking at the back wall of the stage. Better sightlines would be achieved if the table were to be pushed right back with the employees all sitting in a row facing the three-sided audience.
And to achieve clarity, Gardner could insert some context to the dense discussions the workers are having. Examples and scenarios would help the story to progress and prevent it from being mired in generalisations that at the moment mean little.
Runs until 23 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
