The S***heads, review – Violent Stone Age cannibals are brought to life with a sly modern twist

There’s plenty to chew on in the Royal Court’s new play The S***heads – not just raw elk meat and cannibalised brain matter. Though there’s a good amount of that too: for the paleolithic characters that populate Jack Nicholls’ thoughtful debut, acts of barbaric violence are just part of the prosaic everyday.

The S***heads (censorship The Independent’s) transports us to the Stone Age, where we meet a three-person family of cave-dwellers: capable and curious Clare (Jacoba Williams), her ailing father Adrian (Peter Clements), and younger sister Lisa (Annabel Smith), supposedly a teen but with a sort of infantile pluck – think Margaret O'Brien in Meet Me in St Louis. That she is played by a fully grown woman is but one blithe anachronism in a staging that’s full of them: characters speak in modern English, have modern names, and wear items of modern clothing; the cave set includes a freestanding electrical lamp and a floor compartment with various kitchen items. (A brief reveal of a Sports Direct mug gets one of the biggest laughs of the night.)

The very first scene features the show’s showiest theatrical flourish, as Clare hunts and kills a ginormous elk (here, an impressive puppet, positively dominating the modest Jerwood stage). Felling an elk is a two-person job, we are told, and Clare gets help from a stranger called Greg (Jonny Khan), a keen, labradorish outsider who lives above ground. To Clare and her kin, he is just a “s***head”, one of the subhuman others that comprises everyone outside the cave. She’s surprised that he can even speak English. As he regales her with stories of his world, though, she’s captivated – then she strikes him dead and eats his brain.

This is mostly just the setup: the real drama begins when Greg’s widow (Ami Tredrea) shows up to the cave, with her “fat and fast” infant child in tow (another puppet). For a moment, The S***heads flirts with becoming a sort of period-bent comedy of manners, as the interlopers rattle the domestic norms – and prejudices – of the cave family. Before long, it veers into something more tragic.

In gilding the ancient setting with the trappings of our present, Nicholls, alongside designer Anna Reid and directors Aneesha Srinivasan and David Byrne (not that one), makes The S***heads’ symbolic meanings conspicuous. It’s a story ultimately less interested in the specifics of primordial humanity than in the underlying psychologies that remain true today. A risk for a play like this is that its characters are reduced to ciphers: thankfully, they are given enough care and specificity to transcend this. It helps too, that The S***heads is more than just a treatise on isolationism. It is about many things: storytelling; language; ideological inheritance.

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The dialogue that Nicholls contrives for these people is a tricky beast: at once crude and erudite, a sort of mish-mash of codes and lexicons. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the broader, larger-than-life characters who suit it best. Clements’s boorish patriarch and Smith’s peppery, squeak-voiced child are the clear standouts. (They also get the most to work with comedically: there are stretches where The S***heads could use a little more levity.) The puppeteers, captained by Scarlet Wilderink, also do fine, expressive work.

The S***heads comes amid a buzzy, winning run for the Royal Court, and this is no outlier. While there are only a handful of moments in which this production really comes alive, it’s a confident, punchy, and dramatically substantial piece of theatre – exactly what you want from a new original.

‘The S***heads’ is on at Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court until 14 March