From the 16th century art practice of musca depicta (“painted flies”), to David Cronenberg’s 1986 film, to ‘POV ur a fly’ TikToks, culture has long been obsessed with the housefly. Getting intimately involved with our most natural behaviours – eating, drinking, shitting, and dying – the humble fly is often constituted as nothing more than a filthy pest. Yet carrying on in the grand surrealist tradition of Kafka, Dalí, and also Ratatouille (masterpiece) and the Bee Movie (not so much), Tess O’Shea’s House Fly paints the life story of one fly so vividly that the last thing you want to do is swat it away. Maybe humans and bugs have more in common than we think: as our fly asks plaintively, without humans, “who will make the croissants?”
From sweet innocent maggothood, to the hedonistic joys of shagging in a compost bin, to discovering an existentially threatening addiction to pastries and cigarettes in Paris, House Fly is an unstoppably silly, gleeful delight over its half an hour-ish runtime: short and sweet, just like a fly’s life. In enviably couture fly drag, O’Shea is the full clowning package from antennae to ovipositor: a near-death encounter with an electric fly zapper, and many a comedic and perfectly timed bzz, demonstrate impressive mastery of her art. A fly’s brain may be the size of a pinhead, but to be this cleverly daft is no mean feat of intelligence. House Fly feels like what the Fringe was made for – and the buzz is real.
House Fly, multiple venues, until 13 Aug and 24 – 29 Aug, various times