Doppelgangster / Everybody Loses By Dr Tom Payne

Everybody Loses is a performance of a death by snake bite. In this one man show Doppelgangster’s Dr Tom Payne informs his audience that phone signals have been blocked, the doors locked, he’s shooting up venom, and nobody is leaving until he knows what it is to die.

Drawing on the true, self-documented death of world famous herpetologist Dr Karl Patterson Schmidt, historical accounts of the religious ritual of Snake Handling, Doppelgangster’s own personally documented accounts of self-poisoning, reptilian myths of genesis and the coming apocalypse, Everybody Loses interrogates societal obsessions with eternal youth, eternal life, and the destruction of our planet.

Presentation and performance styles evoke and appropriate 1950s scientific lectures, death diaries, suicide notes, Southern-style snake handling, and the warnings of that one scientist at the start of every disaster film ever. Everybody Loses is both a glorious spectacle and a grave work; obliquely engaging with themes of climate change and the 6th great extinction; asking, with the unprecedented scientific documentation of the changing planet, and our failure to respond to the symptoms, is it too late to stop the poison?