Funeral Teeth at 53two

Do you remember the final time your parents gave you a bottle before bed? Or the last time you placed a tooth under your pillow? Probably not. But once, those moments mattered – and they just stopped one day and never came back. In Funeral Teeth, coming to 53two this May, Succulent Theatre turn their attention to life’s smaller, stranger losses in a queer tragicomedy that gets right up in your face and asks what you’re grieving, why, and whether you’ve even clocked it yourself yet.

Structured in a nonlinear format, the show brings together raw, autobiographical fragments, moving through loss in all its forms. Death is in there, of course, but it’s not the only thing we grieve. Smaller, stranger losses accumulate over a lifetime. Messy nights out with your friends when you were younger, relationships that just slipped through your fingers, things you didn’t realise mattered until they were gone.

What’s painfully true is often painfully funny

Funeral Teeth is deliberately unfiltered, with performers shifting between characters, memories and moods. There’s humour here too – dry, awkward, sometimes a bit chaotic – sitting right alongside something more exposed. What’s painfully true is often painfully funny. From deadpan jokes to something emotionally vulnerable, Succulent Theatre’s style leans into contradiction, with physical theatre and bursts of movement cutting right through the storytelling.

If grief is rarely neat, Funeral Teeth doesn’t try to make it so. Instead, it traces how loss accumulates – unevenly, sometimes abruptly, sometimes before you’ve even noticed it happening. That might mean the passing of a loved one. It might mean losing your first tooth, your first love, or the version of yourself that thought something would last forever. Either way, this is a show less interested in explaining grief than in sitting inside it, and asking you to recognise something of your own in the process.