Theatre Review: Thick & Tight: Natural Behaviour at Lakeside Arts

The company, co-directed by Daniel Hay-Gordon and El Perry, has spent over a decade bouncing between the Royal Opera House and Duckie, Sadler's Wells and the Posh Club. That split personality is the whole point. Their stated mission is to take a crowbar to stuffy ideas of "artistic excellence", and Natural Behaviour does exactly that. It's a run of short, performed portraits of human and non-human life that sits somewhere between a variety show and a biology lesson that's escaped the classroom.

The question underneath it all is a pointed one: who gets to decide what's "natural"? Nature, it turns out, is gloriously, stubbornly diverse, and anyone who uses it as a stick to beat queer people with hasn't been paying attention to the seagulls. It's an argument made through dance, mime, drag, satire and poetry rather than a lecture. The politics are woven into the fabric of the performance, emerging through its parade of strange and wonderful bodies rather than being delivered as a manifesto.

What makes the production work is its balance. Comedy is continually interjected with moments of powerful, beautifully choreographed movement, the shifts in tone giving the show a richness that a straightforward parade of sketches might struggle to achieve. The absurdity and the beauty don't cancel each other out. Instead, they sit alongside one another, reminding us that the body can be ridiculous, expressive, unruly and moving all at once. There's something quietly radical in that, too: a refusal to accept that the serious must be solemn, or that the ridiculous cannot carry meaning.

Hay-Gordon and Perry are joined by a strong cast: Annie Edwards of Candoco, Azara Meghie of Talawa, who co-created the Baldwin's Room section, and Jahmarley Bachelor of Punchdrunk. Together, they inhabit a world in which the boundaries between human and non-human, high art and popular entertainment, the grotesque and the beautiful are continually unsettled. The short-form structure allows the production to move between different registers without becoming trapped in any one of them. Its success, though, depends on that balance holding: the humour needs room to breathe, and the movement needs room to resonate.

The design team of Tim Spooner, Pam Tait and Tink Flaherty, alongside lighting designer Nao Nagai, help give shape to this deliberately unruly world. With its improbable cast of creatures and characters, the production demands a visual language capable of moving between the absurd and the affecting. The critical response has been enthusiastic. The Observer called the production "fabulous", while the Guardian awarded it four stars following a sell-out week at Battersea Arts Centre in 2025. That short-form structure sustains its momentum throughout, elevating the piece beyond accessibility.

And that accessibility is worth recognising - it has been considered as part of the production itself, with an access coordinator, a pre-show access session and audio description consultancy built into the process. Accessibility in performance should hardly be remarkable, but it remains far from universal. Its inclusion here is another indication of a company willing to question not only what belongs on stage, but who gets to experience it.

Ultimately, Natural Behaviour is at its most compelling when it allows its contradictions to remain unresolved. Funny and strange, beautiful and occasionally absurd, it challenges the impulse to sort the world into neat categories of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Nature has never been as orderly as we'd like to believe. Perhaps it's time we stopped pretending that people should be.

Thick & Tight: Natural Behaviour played at Lakeside Arts on Thursday 16 October 2026.