Kiss and no-tell: Molly Whitehouse’s Minnie and Dan Poppitt’s Alan in Love At First Bite, the play where biter and lover changes from show to show
WHO’S the sucker in vampire rom-com Love At First Bite? The biter or the bitten? The smiter or the smitten? Maybe both, maybe neither, especially when the answer changes with every performance.
York company Black Sheep Theatre Productions return to Theatre@41 with the premiere of writer-performers Dan Poppitt & Molly Whitehouse’s gothic spin on the dating game in the age of Tinder swipes and increasingly anti-social distancing.
The setting is metropolitan, London street names abounding, but it could be universal. To either side of the black-box stage are Minnie and Alan’s flats, fitted with domestic detail to match their characters.
Charlie Clarke, centre, holds court in one of her myriad cameo guises in Love At First Bite as Molly Whitehouse’s Minnie and Dan Poppitt’s listen in on their London Underground journey
In the middle is a space for tables – and for the turning of tables – in a pub or restaurant or indeed a street or Tube carriage, where chameleon Charlie Clarke spins her multitude of often comic, invariably perky roles and accents.
First up, she is overseeing the speed-dating game where Whitehouse’s Minnie and Poppitt’s equally awkward Alan first meet. Conversation is stilted, wilted on the wine, but somehow they still connect as nervy dates and gradually loosening laughter follow, their choice of black T-shirts saying as much as they do.
One thing leads to another, but “what if one of them were a creature of the night”, as the show promo teases? The identity of the vampire suddenly sinks in at the climax to Act One, but as mentioned above, the fang bearer switches from show to show – in a case of I’m A Lover, Not A Biter – and so your reviewer will bite his tongue.
Director Josh Woodgate, left, with his Love At First Bite cast members Molly Whitehouse, Dan Poppitt and Charlie Clarke
Poppitt and Whitehouse’s deadpan, even nonchalant, humour and cultural savvy put you in mind of Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s zombie apocalypse movie Shaun Of The Dead with Love At First Bite’s combination of seemingly aimless lives, horror comedy and oddball romance. Their performances are arch, deliberately awkward, quirky, intriguing, full of surprises too.
All the while, Clarke is popping in and out, speed-changing costumes and characters as if in a sketch revue, from moustachioed French waiter to friends and family. Best of all is her living embodiment of cloud artificial intelligence assistant Alexa, a ring of light on her head switching on and off with every voice-activated change of request from Alan’s “Latest Play List”, her metronomic Alexa manner becoming ever more irritating as it always does.
Look out too for mischievous director Josh Woodgate’s cameo as a bored, pranking ice-cream salesman, an extra joy in this sharp-as-a-fang, transmutable love story, where you may well wish to watch both of today’s performances to see how Black Sheep’s game of Who Is Hunter, Who Is Prey? Plays out differently each time as “Love At First Bite toys with romance, rewrites folklore and invites us to consider what it means to love…and to hunger”.
Box office: tickets.41monkgate.co.uk.
Black Sheep Theatre Productions’ retro B-movie pastiche poster for Dan Poppitt and Molly Whitehouse’s Love At First Bite