The Best Fastest Worst Saddest Longest Most Complex Hardest Funniest begins as an exchange of contradictory statements about the world, with different performers offering what seem to be their personal opinions about a wide range of topics. Describing through a range of superlatives the saddest thing in the world, the worst film ever made, the most dangerous wild animal, the loneliest place in a house, the best way to die, the funniest thing on the Internet, the most frightening sound in the world, the worst way to educate a child, the most delicious and unhealthy fast food and the occasions or circumstances where time passes most slowly, the performance appears as a kind of anecdotal and often contradictory encyclopaedia of human life.

Framed as a catalogue of simple everyday information, The Best Fastest Worst Saddest… soon becomes a complex conversation about the world and the things we know, learn and believe about it, revealing the performers or characters through a complex web of opinions, stories and statements. Performed initially in translation by the Lisbon-based group Comphania Maior comprising performers over the age of 60, Etchells’ text took on another dimension as the kinds of opinions ventured, stories told and experiences recounted both confirm and overturn audience perceptions and preconceptions about the performers themselves and the lives they might have lived.

The Best Fastest Worst Saddest… weaves a fascinating path through the mundane business of recipes, domestic life advice and DIY car maintenance to the more abstract and philosophical realms of romance, morality, mortality, optimism and pessimism.

First production in Portugese translation, as
O melhor e o mais rápido, o pior e o mais triste, o mais longo, o mais complexo, o mais difícil, e o mais divertido
Text – Tim Etchells
Direction – Jorge Andrade
Co-produced by CCB, Companhia Maior and mala voadora