The Shitheads review – primal urges rear up in a playful, prehistoric oddity

Cave people with very different perspectives meet on an elk hunt in Jack Nicholls’ savage but sweet play about love and violence among early humans

Love is expressed with a licked thumb run down a forehead in Jack Nicholls’ dazzlingly unpredictable debut play. Savage and sweet and entirely strange, The Shitheads transports us back tens of thousands of years, to a time when survival required good aim with your hand axe, and squeamishness would not serve you well.

Early humans Clare (Jacoba Williams, slippery and wild) and Greg (Jonny Khan, puppyishly excitable) meet on the hunt for an elk (a beautiful raggedy creature designed by Finn Caldwell and captained by Scarlet Wilderink, absolutely alive – until it is not). Never having met anyone like the other, they are both in awe of their opposing perceptions of time and the future, of living and dying. Worthy of a licked thumb.

David Byrne and Aneesha Srinivasan direct with a thirst for blood and a delight in playful, prehistoric oddity. Interactions between characters are wide-eyed and primal, a sense of wonder accompanying their blunt peculiarities. With chatty, often simplified speech, Nicholls builds a world reliant on spears and seeds while encapsulating the grandness of what it means to dream, to listen and to fight for your survival.

Clare has grown up in a cave protecting her eager little sister Lisa, who if left to hunt anything larger than a rabbit would be flattened in seconds (played with bounding energy by Annabel Smith), and their father (Peter Clements, wonderfully menacing), an ailing man who has built his girls’ worlds on myths of the other, “shithead” people outside. They can’t talk, he says. They’re stupid. Their dreams become yours, he says, if you eat them. But here is Greg, telling Clare a story and dismantling her reality. And here comes Danielle (Ami Tredrea, rugged and wary), Greg’s partner, climbing down into Clare’s cave.

Choosing wild imagination over accuracy, Anna Reid’s design artfully merges red-dust cave paintings with armchairs and lamps, and bones dangling down as decoration. The story seems to escape the confines of this stony home, grandeur demanded of its gruesomeness. Discovered through the Royal Court’s Open Submissions scheme, The Shitheads demonstrates the joy of greater risks being taken on our stages. The end would benefit from a trim, but this feral story soars with untamed life.

• At the Royal Court theatre, London, until 14 March