Interview with Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, EVITA TOO!
Conducted by Penny for Theatre and Tonic
Brought to the stage by Rebecca Biscuit and Louise Mothersole, aka Sh!t Theatre, Evita Too is a unique mega-musical which races through the wild story of Isabel Perón, gogo-dancer-turned-president who led Argentina for 18 disastrous months. After its hugely successful run at Soho Theatre, the production heads to the Southbank Centre for a limited run this festive season. Ahead of that run we were joined by the duo, who wrote and perform in the show, to find out more.
1. Why did Isabel Peron interest you as a subject for a show?
We were firstly interested in Isabel Peron through the - true! - story we were told, of she and her husband Juan Peron living with the preserved corpse of his previous wife, the famous Evita, displayed in their dining room.
After some (a lot!) of research, we became interested in Isabel Peron herself because of her ridiculously fascinating life story. But then, after even more digging, we became even more interested in how someone with such a ridiculously fascinating life story, and who was the first ever female president of a country in the history of the world, could be almost completely forgotten. Left out of history.
2. How much research did you have to do when writing Evita Too?
We spent over a year researching. We read everything it is possible to read about Isabel Peron (mostly in Spanish. We are very lucky that Becca speaks Spanish!) We became fellows at the British Library Eccles Centre for America Studies, in order to dig up everything possible. We researched Populism, and the differences between the Populism in Europe and the West vs South American Populism, particularly in Argentina. We researched Peronism. We researched the lives of Juan Peron and Evita Peron. We learned and watched everything we could find about Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s EVITA, and megamusicals in general.
We researched the Falklands War and, for a while, had a website trying to start a LARPing movement for it. We studied world leaders in Europe. We researched the earliest expressions of human art, in particular the Cave of Hands in the Patagonian Desert. We took research trips to Buenos Aires and Madrid. We went down an Elaine Paige rabbit hole. We got obsessed with human hands. We watched documentaries about megamusical mega fans that made us panic about our own mental health. We went down another route thinking about our own legacy where we almost had our eggs frozen using Arts funding for the musical. We listened to so much Andrew Lloyd Webber music that we began to panic about our mental health again. EVITA TOO could have been 6 hours long. We managed to whittle it down.
3. Your run at the Southbank follows a successful summer run of a certain musical called Evita (One) that some might say took inspiration from your style of mixing live performance with video content. Why have you incorporated multimedia into your shows (and will you be performing any of this one from a balcony outside the theatre?)
Yes, thank you for noticing the Sh!t Theatre homage within the recent Evita One. We are honoured.
We tend to incorporate multimedia in our shows just to prove that we aren’t making sh!t up! We’ve been called ‘Documentary Theatre’ before, and that is part of how we use, say, video footage and photos. We make shows about things we find interesting but part of what makes them interesting is how surprising or unbelievable they are and the ‘proof’ part of the multimedia helps with that; the audience need to know we are telling the truth. But sometimes our visuals are used as a punchline. We love playing with juxtaposition and having multimedia as the third performer on stage allows us to do that, both for comical and emotional effect.
Weeeell… no spoilers but we are hoping to do our own homage to the balcony moment in the recent Evita One.
4. Evita Too includes original music. What’s your musical background?
Our musical background is pretty much self-taught. We have different but complimentary tastes in music (the crossover point on the ven diagram is folk music, Dolly Parton, and the songs from Lionel Bart’s Oliver! - not counting music by The Muppets, which we feel is universal and defies genre). We’ve always written songs for our shows, it’s something we enjoy. Louise, in particular, has always wanted to one day write a musical and this is the closest we’ve got so far.
5. How would you describe the Sh!t Theatre audience experience?
It’s hard to say, as we are potentially the only 2 people on the planet who could never experience being in the Sh!t Theatre audience (unless we finally get enough funding for the ABBA Experience-style hologram show we have on the back-burner).
The closest we’ve come to this experience is watching ourselves back on camera and we hope our audience isn’t sitting there thinking, ‘Oh god would you look at the size of their double-chins!’
6. How important is it to you that your shows do not shy away from political comment?
We think we will always want to make work about something. We don’t think we’d know how to make a show that doesn’t have some sort of political or social comment. We tried once to make a show that was just a Dolly Parton tribute (DollyWould), and it ended up being about Roland Barthes, semiotics, branding/commercialism and death.
We always include a little of ourselves in our shows, an update or window into how we, Sh!t Theatre, are doing. And we don’t live in a vacuum, our lives are and will always be in symbiosis with what is going on in the world around us - our shows wouldn’t feel true, otherwise. And, for some reason we haven’t unpicked yet, we value Truth in our work - possibly because, one day in the future, years of Truth in our shows will allow us one big Lie that everyone will just believe.
7. You’ve covered some very popular Christmas films in your shows – following on from Sh!t Actually and your Sing-A-Long-A Muppet Christmas Carol, is there another Christmas film that you’d like to give the Sh!t Theatre treatment?!
We have realised it is pointless trying to create anything new when perfection already exists: The Muppet Christmas Carol. So, whatever happens, we will always do our Sh!t Theatre’s Singa-longa-Muppet Christmas Carol. We’ll probably keep at it, though, making more Christmas shows. We love Christmas.
8. And is there one you wouldn’t touch?!
Oooh good question. Well, we’ve already touched the best Christmas film (see above). But only touched it. We haven’t changed it in any way. We suppose we wouldn’t touch the version with ‘The Love is Gone’ song still in it. We think the film is perfect without it. And, no, you don’t need to hear that song to ‘understand the reprise’ at the end. ‘The Love We Found’ works on its own. Like every other banger in the film, it works on its own. That’s the side of the fence we sit on. Yes, we may lose audiences over this, but we won’t compromise our integrity just for popularity. For money? Maybe. Yes, yes, you could probably pay us to screen the version with the scene back in. Good point, yes.
9. What’s next for Sh!t Theatre?
For our next project we’re collaborating with the band Martha and the Muffins, the show is called Echo Echo Echo Beach. It’s about nostalgia, we think. Also Sh!t Theatre Drink Rum With Expats is back in 2026 and Or What’s Left Of Us will be touring!
10. Why should people book to see Evita Too this Christmas?
We think people should book to see Evita Too this Christmas because that’s when it’s on. If they book any time other than this December at the Southbank, they’ll miss it. Also, it’s a musical but not a Christmas show - so anyone who needs to escape the festivities can come and spend an hour and a half with us in sunny Argentina, but still enjoy the singing, laughter and gratuitous nudity that make a Sh!t Theatre show at this time of the year.
Evita Too plays at Southbank Centre from 9 - 31 December 2025.
