Ablutions @ Assembly Roxy

“You’re an experienced silent vomiter,” FellSwoop Theatre’s lead tells us in Ablutions, a beautifully sleazy tale of personal decay and domestic despair, told in the second person. An ageing bartender – and professional alcoholic – shares his self-loathing with the audience while the three other cast members provide a live soundtrack and portray other characters such as a pitiful regular, the coked-out manager, a middle-aged lady who expresses herself through burlesque, and the ghost of a Hollywood belle.

In order to leave the cul-de-sac he finds himself in, the disintegrating barman packs up his shady scheming and self-medication and takes the show on the road, to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Without any props other than their bodies and voices, the four performers fill the bare stage and transform it into bars, byways, and bathrooms of various levels of hygiene and raunchiness. The guitars, harmonica and singing give the bleak story the warm, melancholic undertone of unpolished Americana, which raises Patrick deWitt’s sharply funny writing to a spectacular performance.

FellSwoop deserve a larger stage than the one in Assembly Roxy’s downstairs theatre, but their performance is so mesmerisingly intimate and their gestures so subtle that it might take away from the play’s effect. But they certainly should see the house sell out every single afternoon.