Review: Everybody Dies/The Fly (Bitesize Festival/Riverside Studios)

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️⭐️

In 2023, writer-performer Léa Jackson entered the Straight8 film competition with a three-minute short, Everybody Dies/The Fly, which would fall on the radar of theatre director Kirsten Grinstead. After workshopping the material at the Royal Court, Jackson and Grinstead have now brought Everybody Dies/The Fly to Riverside Studios, as part of the venue’s Bitesize Festival of short, developmental theatre.

Upon entering the studio, we find a dirt-riddled stage with scattered books, nail polishes, and a body, face down among the dirt. We are in a space between life and death, a space in which this person has unceremoniously found themselves, and a space through which they and we must learn how to navigate over the next sixty minutes. They are joined as the play begins by another person, and questions and answers build in unison.

Performed by Jackson and another actor, either Kaia Hickson or Kate Reed-Williams depending on the performance, Everybody Dies/The Fly is best seen as something you should struggle to follow. While this didn’t sit too comfortably with me at first, my clutching at any hint of a more conventional narrative, I warmed to the show as I became more engrossed in the energy of the work, the hints at what may be happening and the snapshots of how this person’s life came to this (at least partial) end.

Both performers (Hickson was performing when I saw the show) brought a frantic energy to their work, sometimes totally unified and other times at complete odds with one another. Jackson brings a calm, defeated quality to a character who has seemingly come to terms with the loneliness of purgatory, while Hickson carried the requisite fear and franticness of a person trying to come to terms with a life-ending incident they themselves cannot fully recall.

Grinstead, as director, keeps a tenuous balance between what is to be clear and what should weight as questions on the audience’s minds. Voiceovers mingle with the live dialogue of the actors, and a minimum of movement is utilised to ensure our focus stays on the characters as we try in vain to fully comprehend their fates. Behind the performance are words and poems displayed, as if to both clarify the surrounding events while further mystifying them, and Grinstead brings this same mesmerising but chaotic energy to what is happening below, in the limbo these two characters must share.

The traditionalist in me longed for a clearer narrative, something easier to connect with. Another part of me, more willing to accept obvious vibes over clear storytelling, and more captivated by Jackson and Hickson than lost as to what has become of their characters, sat back and accepted the answers I would never receive. This is how a show as experimental, as singular, as Everybody Dies/The Fly ought to be watched, I would think – don’t try too hard to follow along, just embrace that the show, like real life, will raise more questions than it will offer answers.

Everybody Dies/The Fly played as part of Riverside Studios’ Bitesize Festival

For updates on future runs follow the team at https://www.instagram.com/everybodydiesthefly/?hl=en

For tickets and information about Bitesize Festival visit https://riversidestudios.co.uk/see-and-do/bitesize-festival-176991/