Review: EVITA TOO at The Southbank Centre

Date: 11/12/25

Stars: 4

Evita Too is exactly the kind of theatrical oddity that only Sh!t Theatre could make: part political excavation, part parody of pop-culture mythmaking, part musical, and part fever dream about what happens when history simply shrugs and forgets a woman who once ran a country. In the Purcell Room, the usually sleek space feels like it’s been taken hostage by Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, who arrive armed with roller skates, microphones, mischief, and a determined belief that Isabel Perón deserves better than being reduced to a footnote with bad PR.

From the moment the show begins, it’s clear the pair have done their digging. They come at Isabel’s story like two researchers who fell down a Wikipedia black hole at 2am and emerged twelve hours later with a full conspiracy corkboard. The difference is that Biscuit and Mothersole turn their findings into something theatrical: wild songs, half-serious political musings, deranged sketches, and a kind of mock-epic storytelling that doesn’t try to be tidy. If anything, the mess is the point. Isabel’s life was messy. Her legacy is even messier. Why pretend otherwise?

The new music is a big part of the fun. The songs are chaotic, catchy, occasionally beautiful, and often hilarious. They slot into the show like commentary tracks — sometimes lifting a moment into full silliness, sometimes undercutting it, sometimes exposing a shard of feeling the comedy can’t quite cover. The pair can shift from punk-cabaret scrappiness to something unexpectedly tender, and they never apologise for the gear changes.

The humour is relentless, but it’s cleverer than it looks. Running jokes pay off in ways you don’t see coming. One-liners sneak up on you long after the scene has moved on. Even the show’s own theatrical obsessions become punchlines — including a moment of Gillian Anderson adoration that sent several people in the audience (your reviewer included) into a small but noticeable spiral of joy. When a show happily admits its creators have celebrity crushes, political frustration, and a slightly obsessive relationship to research, it opens the door to a kind of honesty that’s hard to fake.

The puppetry might be the show’s secret weapon. It’s inventive, expressive and at times genuinely moving. What could’ve been a gimmick becomes a surprisingly effective way of exploring control and manipulation — two ideas Isabel’s story is tangled in. The puppets are funny when they need to be funny, eerie when they need to be eerie, and occasionally far more soulful than seems reasonable for a piece of carved material.

Biscuit and Mothersole steer all this chaos with a confidence that feels both deeply rehearsed and wildly unhinged. Scenes tumble into each other with purpose even when they pretend not to. The pair can switch from slapstick to sincerity in the space of a breath, and somehow you follow them, because beneath the jokes there is real fascination and even a little anger. They’re not trying to rescue Isabel Perón from history — they’re trying to understand what it means that she vanished from it.

It’s a show full of contradictions: silly but smart, chaotic but precise, irreverent but genuinely thoughtful. And it doesn’t aim for a clean moral. Instead, it gives you a woman erased by political myth-making, asks you to sit with that discomfort, then distracts you with another joke before you get too comfortable.

Evita Too is sharp, strange, generous, and far funnier than any piece about Argentinian political history has any right to be. Biscuit and Mothersole take a forgotten chapter of the twentieth century and blow it open with humour, music, and a surprising amount of heart. It leaves you laughing, thinking, and slightly unsure how you got here — which, for this company, is exactly the goal.

Evita Too plays at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room until 31st December 2025: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/sht-theatre-evita-too/