“What If They Ate the Baby?” at Soho Theatre
Tom Bolton in the West End
20 March 2025
New York performance duo Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice are fringe stars, winners of Edinburgh Fringe First Awards for each of their three shows: What If the Rodeo Burned Down, A Letter to Lyndon B Johnson or God, and What If They Ate the Baby? Their success has brought them to bigger audiences at Soho Theatre, where they are currently performing the latter two shows as a double bill.
Natasha Roland and Xhloe Rice.
Photo credit: Morgan McDowell.
Their distinctive performance style combines funny, experimental writing with surreal physical techniques, and is both highly entertaining and brilliantly strange. They pick at the tropes of American society and culture, as seen in film and music, until they become something both familiar and disturbing.
In What If They Ate the Baby?, Natasha and Xhloe play suburban American housewives in 1950s dresses inhabiting an unsettling neon interior. A house call to return a casserole dish is all conventional social niceties, in which everything is unsaid. The script becomes a cycle of repetition, carrying shifting meanings as the never-ending visits plays out again and again. Physical gestures are stylized to the point of absurdity, and underlying social and sexual tensions spill to the surface.
The two characters want one another, and intercut scenes show them indulging their fantasies. It is also clear that what they are doing is unacceptable in the society of the time, and there are also disturbing suggestions that normal is in fact very strange. There are bodies literally under the patio, and hints at dark deeds reveal a queer rebellion that is constantly bubbling to the surface.
What If They Ate the Baby? plays with different sources which have set our expectations of brittle post-war suburban USA. The atmosphere is David Lynch crossed with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, as deep tensions play out between the pair as both insist everything is ok with their husbands, the neighbours, and their homemaking lives. The show is very funny, and very tightly scripted and performed.
The insistent repetition of actions, the meanings of which shift every time, is reminiscent of Forced Entertainment, while the combination of silliness and rigour is worthy of Sh!t Theatre. Natasha and Xhloe use music to great effect, from 1950s popular song “Music! Music! Music!” to hip hop, such as “Punk Tactics” by Joey Valence & Brae.
Their finely coordinated interplay makes the show a mini-masterpiece of physical theatre. The pair are original, imaginative, and highly entertaining performers, and the show is a sophisticated treat which fully justifies their growing reputation.
