Last Updated on February 13, 2026
A tumble through dark prehistory
3.0 out of 5.0 starsQuentin Tarantino is Hollywood’s prophet of violence. His knack for purifying stories into gory climaxes is notorious in modern cinema. Yet, upstairs at the Royal Court in the intimate Jerwood Theatre, Jack Nicholls’s debut play, The Shitheads, gives Quentin a run for his money.
The Shitheads is part period piece, part family drama and part myth. It unfolds at some time in prehistory (10,000 – 50,000 BC, to be exact). Nomadic hunter-gatherers coexist with a family of cannibalistic cave-dwellers who justify their eating habits by dehumanising their human prey. Hunter-gatherers are ‘shitheads’, they say – inferior, stupid, without expansive interior lives.
One of these cave-dwellers, a straight-talking fighter named Clare (Jacoba Williams – Vera), meets Greg (Jonny Khan – Statues), an endearing, open-hearted gatherer. They team up to bring down an elk – a great beast brought to life as a huge, three-person puppet.
Pacing around the dying animal, the humans explore each other’s worlds and minds. “You can talk?!” asks Clare, raised to believe that ‘shitheads’ are dim. “You don’t know what a funeral is?!” laughs Greg, shocked that burying family members alongside decaying animals is Clare’s common practice. These are ostensibly the seeds of a humorous, world-expanding friendship for both characters – tools are shared, dreams recounted – until Clare brutally murders Greg and eats his brain.
From here, the play lifts off into an experimental narrative about empathy, manipulation and revenge. Clare invites Greg’s bereaved partner Danielle (Ami Tredrea – All of Us Strangers) and her baby (a puppet) to take refuge from the worsening climate in their family cave. (Unlike the gatherers, Clare’s family stores beer, meat, and berries.) But the cave-dwelling patriarch Adrian (Peter Clements – Femme) is incensed by the ‘shitheads’ arrival. Old secrets come to light; his family dominion capitulates with bloody swiftness.
The Shitheads is about society in the loosest sense – it’s a treatise on shared human stories; a tendency towards chaos and implosion; the struggle to survive. By enveloping these grand themes, Nicholls’s script offers a quasi-history of imagination itself, of cultural othering and brutality.
The Shitheads’s narrative mode is squarely allegorical: the prehistoric setting is a system for exploring humanistic themes, not a realistic commitment to historical drama (at one point, a Sports Direct mug appears and soft jazz plays in the background). Yet it’s precisely this hybrid makeup – this mixed commitment to allegory and real people – that hampers genuine investment in the characters. By staking out the drama as a universalised treatise on human brutality, the play sacrifices deeper immersion in the characters’ inner worlds. There’s always an eye to ‘the context’ – to the symbolic framework – rather than the characters’ intricacies.
At points, The Shitheads felt like watching a Tarantino-inflected nursery rhyme: it’s hard to ‘get lost’ in a play that implicitly claims, as nursery rhymes do, to be everywhere and nowhere all at once. Yet its weird temporality is also what makes The Shitheads a deeply experimental work. Constructing a ninety-minute drama at a step removed from reality is a feat on its own. Nicholls’s writing, with David Byrne and Aneesha Srinivasan’s direction, bravely commits to the curious, non-linear space between fact and fiction.
What shines in the play is its puppetry. There was a wonderful audience gasp when the giant elk first graced the small Jerwood theatre. It’s a mechanical creature imposing enough for a West End auditorium, let alone a small top-floor stage. Its huge antlers sway just centimetres from the front row. Its glassy, black eyes transfuse authentic pain; its dying screams haunt the action throughout. The sensitive animation of the gatherer child also brings a delicacy to the final scenes. Scarlet Wilderink, as puppetry captain, deserves great credit.
Annabel Smith (You Look Fine) as Lisa is another standout performance. Her immaculate comedic timing as the cave-dwelling child glues the family unit together when it threatens to break down.
Like the details of prehistoric life, The Shitheads is hard to pin down. It’s genuinely experimental theatre that’s allegorical mode ultimately caps its potential to touch the heart. But Nicholls’s desire to innovate narrative conventions – to animate the weird, shared zone of history and invention – speaks of a writer with great theatrical ambitions. The Shitheads is a tricky first play from a writer with promise.
The Shitheads runs at the Royal Court Theatre from 10th February to 14th March.
Royal Court Theatre
Sloane Square
Chelsea
London
SW1W 8AS
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