The Last Drop review – everything is rotten in this dark domestic comedy

Dante Passarelli’s play, part of the Edinburgh fringe’s São Paulo Showcase, is an atmospheric hour borrowing themes from Hamlet T his year’s fringe variously puts Hamlet in the Big Brother house with Lady Macbeth, makes him “ Prince of Sweden ” in an Italian two-hander and grinds the play into what Polonius might call a “tragical-comical” swipe at the meat industry . Dante Passarelli’s The Last Drop, part of the festival’s São Paulo Showcase , borrows the opening and closing lines of Shakespeare’s masterpiece and pursues similar themes of madness, revenge and surveillance in a story where everything, not just something, is rotten. The opening tableau resembles a murder scene: has death-stare Cynthia (Fernanda Zancopé) done away with her husband, Gilberto (Ernani Sanchez), who lies sprawled on the floor? Apparently not: as he rises, and they resume their bickering, you realise wider crimes are at play in this densely packed city where new buildings rise around them and construction often involves corruption. Suspicion is rife: they have lived for years in this apartment block with its peeling wallpaper and hold their upstairs neighbour, so wasteful with water, responsible for the mouldy stain on their ceiling.

Sniff, sniff … Drip, drip. What exactly are all those other appalling smells and sounds invading their home? Directed to claustrophobic effect by Passarelli and Zancopé for Manás Theatre Lab, with English surtitles and a suitably queasy lighting design, the play unfolds against a backdrop of social and environmental unrest. Its stark commentary about class and inequality at times brings to mind Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. The 60-minute play crams another hour’s worth of plot into its final minutes which rather dilutes its richly oblique atmospherics, often playing on the notion of the memory of water and giving it a sinister, rather than cleansing, quality.

There is a sense of nature watching on, judging our behaviour. A black domestic comedy which adds some hilariously unerotic marital foreplay to the mix, it gives a sense of individual lives adrift in the social system. Somewhere within its extremes you will recognise everyday experiences of the housing industry’s venality. You wouldn’t want to live at this address, but it’s well worth a visit.

⚡ Effects Interpreter