EVERYBODY is theatre for everybody. Bar none. Which is ironic because the venue, the Kings Cross Hotel has at least three. Bars that is.
EVERYBODY is the embodiment, the epitome, of everything old is new again.

Based on the medieval Everyman plays, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has fashioned a fresh take on these traditional texts revving up the narrative, jettisoning archaic jargon and replacing it with a dynamic demotic.

EVERYBODY is a walk with Love and Death, literally, as Death comes to Everybody to take them on his journey to that undiscovered country. Death, dressed in vibrant colours rather than the regular black, decrees that Everybody can be accompanied on the journey. Everybody petitions Friendship and Kinship who both decline, as do Strength, Mind, Beauty, and The Five Senses. At a bonfire of the vanities, the kindle dwindles, leaving Everybody out in the cold.

The Everyman texts were staged as morality plays and EVERYBODY honours that concept with a modern message of be kind to each other, for, after all, we are Everybody.

Every performance of EVERYBODY is unique as the cast are determined by lottery from the ensemble cast. Much like life, really. At the performance I attended the die was cast very differently to the night before and chances are, quite contrasting to the night following.

Certainly its a cast to die for, whatever permutations the luck of the draw dictates. Kate Bookalil, Caitlain Burley, Annie Byron, Giles Gartrell-Mills, Isaro Kayitesi, Mansoor Noor, Kate Skinner, Samm Ward and Michael Wood are all ferociously funny and poignantly poised.

Making his directorial debut, Gabriel Fancourt has a firm understanding of his material and isn’t afraid of the dark.

Honestly felt and truly expressed, EVERYBODY generates a special and unique dramatic excitement, a theatrical heat, bringing us into contact not only with a piece of traditional theatre bolstered by narrative invention, but with a conscience raising plea for mutual understanding.

Behind every line there beats a passionate desire to improve the human condition.