Glamorous inspiration

0 Lady Rizo is musically gifted and witty, her critiques of her native land right on the button

with Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues to scathing effect while a leftfield mixture of Nancy Sinatra and D’angelo generates a tragically two-sided vignette of gun violence. (It also gives Rizo the opportunity to demonstrate how to sing the word “shit” over five syllables.) The novel combination of Portishead and Peggy Lee, meanwhile,

conveys the disillusionment and defiance associated with the ongoing oppression of women. In between, there are musings on the allamerican values of privilege, patriotism and fame.

Witty, glamorous and musically gifted as she might be, Lady Rizo’s real superpower is her ability to turn an audience into a miniature world of mutual

care and wider responsibility. So it proves here in the show’s climax, in which Rizo elegantly reclaims some tarnished American iconography with a hand from the crowd. It’s just about enough to keep despair at bay in favour of loving resolution. Where there’s light, there’s hope.

BEN WALTERS

Until 19 August. Today 9:10pm.

She asks: would you kill me if I ask you? He’s into killing out of curiosity: how is it to live, knowing you’re about to die. She started with a dog, to put a creature out of its misery, then she got that tingling feeling in her fingers. He’s into teeth. She’s into eyes.

Other People’s Teeth starts from a Hollywood premise: a partnership between two contract killers, Joss and Sol. A Mexican stand-off, with plastic guns, in a tiny room upstairs at C venues? Hohum. Then your ears prick up.

Into the mix of these bedsit killers comes Simon, who likes board games, crosswords but not cross words, and complex fractions of chocolate cake. Dan Sareen plays him as a wonderful straight man to murderous insanity; he’s also the writer. Joss (Becky Downing) is as cold as a steak knife, but pauses to play with a new puppy. It’s all thoroughly entertaining, and definitely not for the squeamish.

Tom Claxton, as Sol, delivers a nasty, utterly persuasive killer, the pivot of the piece. A ginger-haired laughing Norman Bates, he wears Hawaiian shirts and likes to play with his food in the hope it will bite back. It’s a difficult role, between sneering and slaughter. Claxton tells me he’s off to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art; I’d say that’s a good call by their admissions office. TIM CORNWELL

Until 19 August. Today 2:35pm.