Sh!t Theatre are coming to Brighton Fringe this year with their sharp and hilarious new piece ‘Dollywould‘. The story follows an adventure into Tennessee, the heartland of country music and beyond to explore everything from mortality and immortality, originals and clones and what it means to be real. This show follows a sell-out run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe and the announcement of a one-month long run in London. This is the story of Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit as they head to Knoxville in search of ‘Dollywood’, Dolly Parton’s theme park built on the legendary performer’s childhood home. They enlisted the help of genetic scientist Dr Kat Arney to explore the enigma that is Dolly Parton and her name-sake Dolly the sheep.
Packed to the brim with Dolly Parton classics, ‘Dollywould’ will provide ample opportunity for sing-a-longs and fun all around. Mothersole and Biscuit said of their show “We love Dolly Parton. We have always made shows from a place of anger and this year especially – with everything that is going on in the world – we wanted to make a show from a place of love…This is also the story of us getting to Dollywood – the first trip we’ve made since falling out last year.” Sh!t Theatre are a multi-award winning pair of performers who are associate artists of Camden People’s Theatre and won four star reviews from almost every critic of their last show ‘Letters to Windsor’. They’ve won a Fringe First award, a Total Theatre Award, The Arches Brick Award and a Three Weeks Editors’ Choice Award. Additionally on their very long list of accolades they were shortlisted for the Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Award. The ‘sh!t’ in their title doesn’t reflect on their talents in any way, they use their trained disciplines of music, performance art and long-form improvisation to create hilarious and poignant pieces of work that critique the outside world in a very unique way.
‘Dollywould’ covers a lot of bases in terms of narrative and stories that are told. Whilst the girls are in America they try to visit the Body Farm, a forensic medical facility which researches human decomposition which all feeds into their hilarious love-letter to Dolly, immortality, cloning (and sheep).
Dolly Parton is a legend globally but it’s easy to see why she is the focus of these two girls love. Last year when a fire destroyed the town of Pigeon Forge in Tennessee she gave each resident $1000 a month for 6 months to rebuild their lives. She runs a charity that sends books every month to over a million children for the first five years of their life. In the words of the Dollywould’s creators “She does everything her own way, she has her own wit, her own mind and writes her own songs. She is plastic yet real, ridiculous yet respected, we laugh at and with her. She embodies an overblown version of the male fantasy, yet it is an open secret that she is a lesbian. She’s important to us as an artist, role model and probably queer woman.“
Catch this beautifully written and genuinely funny show this year at Fringe. Tickets are available now but get one fast as ‘Dollywould’ is almost guaranteed to sell out!
