Seriously Bad Pharma

Becca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole want to be tested on. They want to be guinea pigs. It’s a year since their attempts to cut out of the dole queue were documented in the Total Theatre award-winning JSA (Job Seekers Anonymous) and they’ve set their sights a little lower. They’re not looking for an adequately paid, non-soul-shredding eight hours per day of labour. All they want now is to offer their bladders up for some experimental Botox treatment. And can they get on the list? Absolutely not.

That’s the bleak diagnosis behind Sh!t Theatre’s latest show, Guinea Pigs On Trial, as the Sh!ts (their term, not mine) take on the shifty world of paid pharmaceutical trials with their combination of joyously scrappy cabaret and hypodermically sharp political satire.

"JSA was obviously about the benefit system," Biscuit says. "And one of the things we’ve noticed while signing on was that a lot of the jobs had been replaced by adverts for phase one medical trials."

It’s a chilling thought that instead of pouring over your CV, your next Job Centre Case Worker could be more interested in your blood type or your sexual history. Accordingly, Sh!t have taken some creepy dramatic inspiration to match the theme. "The whole show is structured like an episode of The X-Files," Mothersole, a Mulder and Scully fanatic, explains. "It’s our attempt at being these heroic investigators."

And their investigations have already thrown up plenty of reasons to be paranoid. Biscuit: "We did an interview with Ben Goldacre," crusading author of Bad Pharma and lucid lid-lifter on the bare-faced corruption of the pharmaceutical industry, "and he said it would be 'batshit crazy' to do this kind of test on swine-flu – and we were offered several of those."

When Sh!t began working on the show, they expected no problems in throwing themselves to the mercy of the pharma industry. But in fact it's proven far from straightforward, and it's thrown up one of starkest issues from last year’s show once again: the gender inequality of the job market.

"We’ve discovered that it’s particularly difficult to get on as a woman," Mothersole reveals. "They’ll often only take women who have gone through the menopause, or who’ve been surgically sterilized." They’re worried about the tests affecting fertility, explains Biscuit, which is worrying enough in itself. 

It’s great meat for their brand of funny and uncompromising performance, and their new show sounds every bit as vital as JSA. It's also an issue Biscuit thinks could a serious impact on performers at this year's Fringe in years to come: "As artists, are we going to have to start depending on other ways of making money, like medical trials, in order to fund our future shows?"

If that doesn't scare the sh!t out of you, I don't know what will.