Sing For Your Life

Down below Waterloo station, in a graffti-washed subway tunnel, a snaking queue of chattering, smoking London theatre-goers amassed outside the Vaults Festival entrance.

The Vaults is quickly becoming a slice of Berlin subculture in the centre of London, five minutes walk from the Southbank but a parallel world away in thought. Here you enter a subterranean netherworld of bars decorated like secret forests, dreamers lounging in deckchairs and new theatrical ideas sparking in the night.

One such new idea, and the reason why the queue soared down the road last week, was Charlie Tuesday Gates’ taxidermy musical ‘Sing For Your Life’. I imagine most people assume anybody involved in the skinning and stuffing of animals fits the horror-movie bill of creepy old druid living in the woods, but Gates is a pretty, young artist, with a mission to raise awareness about animal cruelty through, erm, using their corpses as puppets.

She taught herself taxidermy through a trial-and-error basis (one particular error included a housing inspection where the inspector found a room full of rotting carcasses), and now has a team of friends ringing her whenever they spot fresh roadkill for her cast.

We began the show with a mid-twenties rah being interrupted from a shag by her dog: she slaps it in anger, at which point it escapes onto the streets where it encounters the omniscient Badger and the rapacious Foxy. Badg and Foxy are throwing the biggest, darkest show in all of animaldom, ‘Sing For Your Life’, and so the musical barks into all-singing, all-dancing death.

This is the only stage in all of London right now, and more than probably the world, where you’ll see three skinned supermarket chickens singing Britney’s ‘I’m a Slave 4 U’ about battery farming, or a Badger doing Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang, You Shot Me Down’ about the ongoing cull. And when Slinky the sexy mink gets her kit off to get you thinking about wearing fur… Let’s just say, have a strong stomach.

There were bits and pieces of the writing that were a little rough around the edges, the plot wasn’t uber-strong, but for sheer ingenuity, brilliance and wit, this show needs to be seen to be believed. Charlie Tuesday Gates, we salute you and your dead.

 

• Charlie Tuesday Gates, The Vaults, Leake Street, Waterloo, SE1 8SW

www.vaultfestival.com / www.charlietuesdaygates.co.uk

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