Review: Grubby Little Mitts
Rosie Nicholls and Sullivan Brown present their most ambitious show to date
Grubby Little Mitts
Photo by Dylan Woodley
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Published 07 Aug 2024
Channelling everything into the same twisted universe, Rosie Nicholls and Sullivan Brown's third Grubby Little Mitts Fringe show is their most ambitious to date, their sketches gradually coalescing together into a sprawling single narrative. While affording the hour a sense of purpose, it's not so coherent that the more inexplicable and least satisfying aspects of their bizarre skits can be ignored, and the experience is, counter-intuitively, a more constrained one.
As ever, there's an awkward, fumbling love story between them, in the form of two metrologists struggling against their feelings in spite of themselves. But there are several antagonistic encounters too, including an alien-hunter convinced that she's unmasked an extra-terrestrial, pursuing him to the ends of the Earth; and warring siblings at the sickbed of their ailing Big Mamma. With apocalyptic echoes of everything from Independence Day and The Invaders to George Orwell's Big Brother, via 1980s pop sensations The Weather Girls, nothing is quite what it seems and the duo incorporate plenty of twists, turns, suspicious glances and unfortunately blurted asides. However, the pacier, more animated format works against the tightly written crosstalk that's been the Mitts' calling card, even as the central romance takes too long to emerge and feels undercooked when it does.