Letters to Windsor House review – daffy attack on London’s housing crisis

Summerhall, Edinburgh. Sh!t Theatre turn rifling through the post received by former residents of their flat into rambling but pertinent social theatre.

In 2013, Louise Mothersole and Rebecca Biscuit of Sh!t Theatre moved into an ex-local authority flat together on an estate in north London where the blocks are named after royal residences. The Manor House blocks were used in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List to represent the Polish ghetto. Mothersole and Biscuit show us pictures of their flat. “Our flat is dark,” they tell us, and the screen goes out. They show us pictures of the Happy Man pub where unhappy men drink, the psychiatric hospital behind the block, the fly-tipping that takes place nearby, the damp on the ceiling and the attempts to stop the pigeons shitting on the balconies.

Despite the regal appellation, it’s hardly what an estate agent would call a desirable residence, but like most Londoners in the rental market they pay a right royal rent for the privilege. The flat is also haunted, by the unseen, unknown lives of the previous residents for whom a neverending avalanche of post arrives. After a while, Mothersole and Biscuit start opening the post and try to trace some of the people who lived in Windsor House before them.

The company’s trademark DIY aesthetic, featuring witty ditties and absurd sketch-like interludes in which the pair in this instance are dressed as giant dancing post-boxes, is well to the fore in a show that builds on last year’s success, Women’s Hour. But beneath the apparently rambling, shambolic daffiness is something far more serious: an investigation of what London’s astronomical rental market does to personal relationships, including their own.

While Mothersole and Biscuit start wildly fantasising about the lives of Windsor House’s previous residents (one they presume is a giant baby; another a member of the Turkish mafia), the post starts to tell its own story of transient and often debt-ridden lives. Over a few years an unpaid debt of £10 owed to the Inland Revenue spirals to almost £3,000. Brochures for upmarket country clothing hint at dreams of a life unlived.

This doesn’t have the campaigning agit-prop vim of Lung’s raggedly energising E15, which plays just down the corridor, but it does use satire to good effect; like that other show, it points the insidious social cleansing taking place in London as estates are sold off to private developers by cash-strapped councils. One of the best bits is a film in which Mothersole and Biscuit pose as prospective buyers in a nearby block of luxury flats and are treated royally by a salesperson who assures them that security is in place to protect residents from the denizens of Manor House and the like. That means people like Mothersole and Biscuit, as well as the homeless who are regularly moved on from a patch of wasteland nearby.

The morality of this is held up for scrutiny, and Sh!t have to confront their own integrity when they make a discovery about their own flat. Letters to Windsor House suggests that London’s housing crisis doesn’t just destroy relationships, it undermines personal ethics and basic decency, too.

At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August (not 22 August). Box office: 0131-226 000o.

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