The Room Of Piss
17 November 2024
Barons Court Theatre
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
The Room Of Piss is currently running at the Barons Court Theatre as part of the Voila Festival. You can still catch the show this coming weekend. This absurd comedy tackles themes of uncertainty in the face of change, and living with chronic illness.
Starting with a fairy tale like story on the creation of the Room of Piss, we see one character live the same day over and over, steadily growing more frantic while following the same routine, get up, exercise, drink 4 litres of water, take your medicine 15 times a day, make sure your pee is yellow. The very physical routine repeats again and again, until suddenly, everything changes when they discover that their pee is no longer yellow, it is blue. From here, the show becomes a whirlwind of absurd hilarity, including some minor audience interaction from a doctor trying to push cures and medicines on everyone.
Wild, chaotic, funny, and deeply weird, it’s unlike anything you’ll have seen before. A feral physical clowning show utterly destroying the stage and descending into chaos while constantly questioning routines and perceptions, begging for the acceptance of change and embracing of uncertainty.
While the show is quite something to behold, and very entertaining in its weirdness, it is a very short show that could use more in-depth scenes to bring across its topics more fully, more rounded. The connection to chronic illness is not entirely clear, nor deeply explored. The Room of Piss could easily double its running time and introduce further madness into the action while perhaps looking at what it is trying to achieve with a more detailed lens.
The absurdity and physical comedy work extremely well for this chaotic a show, it just ended way too soon and left me wanting to see more of it!
