Consumerism is the theme of the stand-up comedy See Primark and Die, taking us from a city supermarket to a shopophobia support group and dumpster-diving for free food.
It begins with Claire Dowie, standing centre-stage between two racks of hanging clothes, asking us, “have you ever thought you might die in Primark?” Peckham Primark is so cheap she loves it, even though it feels like you are “entering The Cage… full of atmosphere and menace” from packs of 14-year-old girls.
Yet, like others, she can’t resist its cheapness, getting a pair of jeans for £8 and lots of other bargains, even though on one occasion she thinks she might have been having a panic attack.
It gets her thinking about the subject of consumption. When her 96-year-old Aunt Alice, who worked hard in the garden, dies, she thinks about her probably wanting to become part of the earth rather than being buried in a cemetery, which she says might be better used to build luxury flats.
It seems her aunt would be happy being fed to the pigs as a form of recycling. She admits she doesn’t “know if it would suit Jews or Muslims, though. I know they can’t eat pork, but can pork eat them?”
She begins to avoid supermarkets. One of the first to go was Tesco. She claims, “I well remember Dame Shirley Porter, owner of Tesco in the eighties or the nineties—I don’t remember that well—gerrymandering Westminster to keep the Tories happy at the expense of the poor.”
Becoming shopophobic, she started dumpster-diving for stuff, pointing out that something more frightening to our modern world than Trump and Israel is “sell-by date”. She suggests all the concern about healthy food and fitness “doesn’t make us happier” and is causing problems for the NHS, which doesn’t have as much work to do now that we are all living longer. Gone are the days when “we all had rickets and a sense of humour”.
One of her memories of dumpster-diving before the supermarkets started padlocking the bins was “Keir Starmer going through the bins in Westminster. Rachel Reeves was keeping a lookout… All that trouble Starmer got in taking all those freebies and whatnot—he had to, he’s shopophobic, that’s why he looks like a constipated geography teacher.”
Claire Dowie never loses the audience’s attention with her playful and subversive sixty-minute stand-up comedy spot. The jokes may seem a little random and not entirely serious, but they keep the audience amused.
Primark and Die was first performed under the title Buy Little Buy Less Buy Nothing At All at the Drill Hall Arts Centre in 2010. It is one of four plays from four decades that Claire Dowie is now performing in repertoire.