Beautiful People
Thursday 30 November 7.30pm
Full £12 | Conc £8 | Age 16+
In the award-winning ‘Beautiful People’, comedy duo Ridiculusmus – UK theatre’s most enduring
double act – play Violet, Norman and Arthur, three crustaceous centenarians who move at the
pace of turtles mating and discharge their bodily gases into conveniently placed receptacles. As this
hopelessly endearing trio shuffle with relentless positivity through a slow-mo ballet punctured by
fond fumbling and the manic popping of their pills, they attempt to navigate the murky memories
of a ménage à trois, lumbering from drawing-room farce to the tragi-comedy of death and the
inevitable bleak landscape of loss.
Like all Ridiculusmus works, ‘Beautiful People’ – the final part of a trilogy of plays looking at various
aspects of mental health – is a conflation of painstaking research and lived experience, liberated by
the apparatus of comedy and imagination. Informed by close relationships with inspirational elders,
research into drug treatments for ‘complicated grief’ and the study of ancient mourning rituals, it
began its life with acclaimed seasons in Melbourne, London and Edinburgh, where it was selected
as part of the 2019 British Council Showcase and received the Herald Archangel Award.
“Dangerously funny, scatological, surreal, clever and ultimately powerfully humane”
Mark Brown, The Sunday Herald