For Master Sausage, in their dark, grimy sausage workshop, it seems that life is a perfectly content series of repetitive days and repetitive actions. Make the sausages to order, and then send them back up from the impossibly deep dungeon-like factory.
But when a new Apprentice appears, with artistic ambitions and a quirky personality, the disharmony threatens to break the cycle.
If anything, Butchered reminds us that it doesn’t take much to create the illusion of horror. When Master Sausage sniffs, tastes or slaps handfuls of raw meat and fat around the workshop, Expial Atrocious makes you not only hear it, but feel it.
While the choreographed movements not only give a palpable sense of the weight and heft of their actions, the chalk and cheese pair lug imaginary meat and gristle around the stage to the concussive and oppressive grind and creak of the sausage-making machines, only to bide their time until the next bell rings with an order from those above.
There’s something vaguely reminiscent of the old kid’s TV animation Trapdoor about the setup, only far more twisted and without the friendly charm. Instead, this is a surprisingly dark, and occasionally violent madcap tale.
Don’t expect a conventional narrative, but rather this is an experience that will leave you shocked, shaken and possibly feeling like you want a shower afterwards. And maybe, just maybe, a sausage as well.