It’s immediately obvious when Wil Greenway enters the stage earnestly dancing to Bon Ivor’s Flume with an inflatable shark that A Night to Dismember is not going to be an ordinary theatre show. However, I am not sure anyone was prepared for how weird Greenaway’s story of girlfriend-stealing sharks, space cheese, and talking asteroids was going to be. Luckily, Greenway’s masterful storytelling brought us into his madcap imagination in such a way that we were soon fully immersed in his darkly comic world and not asking questions.
Sincere and charming, the story of A Night to Dismember is at once poetic, hilarious and strangely moving. This is owing to Greenaway’s engaging central character and narrator, an outsider melancholic ‘man-child’ who it is impossible not to warm to and telling a story woven with a rich tapestry of eccentric characters, jet black humour and mad cap scenarios (one of the highlights being a journey across the outback on a quad bike made entirely out of rabbits).
What is perhaps most impressive about A Night to Dismember is, despite the prosthetic limbs made of intergalactic haloumi, a mother who is more interested in home entertainment than her son’s recent dismemberment and a brother in love with a blow-up doll, none of it comes across as random nonsense but rather elements of a perfectly legitimate plot. Greenway is a genuine talent and this show deserves attention.
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