Expial Atrocious brings a potent punk sensibility to this dark fable of unquestioned service and subjugation to duty.

As the audience assembles, Master Sausage and Apprentice are going through the repetitive choreography of a work shift in the cavernous confines of a basement factory. A terrifyingly visceral sound design accompanies their crisp, intensive movements along the crude meat assembly line. Every grind, crush, slop, and scrape is agonisingly rendered, drowning the space in a sort of aural effluence. Jagged, jarring, the two performers deliberately elongate the opening, pushing the viewers into exquisite discomfort, squirming in their seats. When the great compacter malfunctions, interrupting the tedium, it offers a sudden and welcome release. Communication with the impersonal bosses above is through a tube as they issue demands and ask after progress, their voices a fuzzy stentorian static. Ezre Holland and Nic Lawton are an appropriate study in visual contrast: Holland solid and severe, a constellation of hard edges while Lawton is ethereal and soft, a doughy dreamer. The Apprentice seems less convinced by the role, feels a beat behind the Master. For Holland’s veteran sausage maker, the apprentice’s chirpy, perky babble, her insistence that there is time for reflection and art, is anathema to the work at hand. She exists to perform her function and nothing more. She is in thrall to the machines, regarding them with a rapture bordering on the erotic. She bathes in their rancorous noise, whereas her companion collapses as if assaulted. Consumed and defined by her role, she has calcified into pure process, assured her efforts are appreciated by the lords above. Her drive to shut out the Apprentice’s contrary voice takes on a homicidal bent as the narrative progresses and Lawton offers a shocking display of incapacitated speech after a particularly brutal attack. Her physicality in demonstrating the harm done to her is raw and immediate, a feat of bodily and vocal contortion.

The script strongly suggests that the Apprentice may be an aspect of the Master Sausage’s conscience long thought extinguished, popping up unexpectedly (and disagreeably) as her career reaches its end. It is a hostile voice, insisting on some greater purpose, a state of being the Master cannot countenance. Much will be sacrificed by the production’s grisly end which proposes a scenario in which the human characters, much like the animals they process, are also ultimately ground down. Holland and Lawton deliver the message with grungy, unruly abandon, an after-hours larcenous energy. 

{🎟 AD – PR invite – Tickets were gifted in exchange for an honest review}

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