| 
 Unpacked
No
Obvious Trauma
Camden People’s
Theatre, London
Sprint Festival
May 2006.
Reviewed
by Beccy Smith
There’s a well documented history of the useful role
puppetry can perform within a therapeutic context, but Unpacked’s
new show No Obvious Trauma turns this familiar framework on
its head, translating the theory back into theatre, puppets
and all. Unravelling the secrets of a mute trauma patient
– a psychological twist on the old Dumb Witness formula
set against a period background of clipped accent, oh-so-repressed
1930s England – establishes a rich conflict. The theme
of hysteria provides the carnivalesque motor to the drama
and the performance: a chance for a psychiatrist to re-experience
the passion of days gone by and for the elegantly organised
bodies on stage to twist into fantastic shapes and assume
weird tensions.
To a cultivated background of Satie and Chopin, the tension
of bodies in space, tightly choreographed in the small studio,
eloquently expresses the sense of mystery unfolding, and of
the unsettling presence of trauma(s) within this carefully
ordered world. This is a sophisticated narrative with two
complex characters who peer soulfully out to the audience,
although Gilbert Taylor’s Psychiatrist could have done
with a little further development to take him beyond comedic
counterfoil and audience-eye-view. But this is an unusually
satisfying marriage of the abstract form and specific storytelling
which signals a growing maturity in Unpacked’s work.
The puppetry, especially the use of grotesque shadow, is well
integrated aesthetically and dramatically, with its innate
resonances of the object/ patient relationship. And it’s
a joy to watch the controlled animation of the set as a whole,
from locomotive desks to Hitchcockian enclosing screen walls.
Seen on its first night, there’s still development to
be made. The hints of a feminist comment on the diagnosis
of hysteria, beautifully expressed in a lyrical passage where
the female voice is literally and firmly silenced remain latent,
largely down to a lack of clarity about a back-story featuring
single motherhood and female destitution which impedes our
reading of the skewed vision the Doctor holds of his female
patient. There are moments when the emotional seriousness
of the tone teeters perilously on the edge of farce. But there’s
much to look forward to later in the run. With this stylish
physical storytelling of a ripping, atmospheric and original
yarn, Unpacked continue to establish themselves at the forefront
of contemporary physical theatre practice, and to take puppetry
boldly with them.
Barefeet
Theatre
The Revenge Of The Moon Boy
Camden People’s Theatre, London
Sprint Festival
May 2006
Reviewed
by John Ellingsworth
In a play about revenge and murder, it was the revenging murders
that had the greatest impact. They remain in my memory as
the standout scenes. First, the plot: there is a village where
the crops are rotten and no fish are in the sea. It used to
be prosperous. People in the village whisper that perhaps
the degeneration is the fault of the Moon Boy, who was abandoned
in the forest as a baby, yet did not die, and grew up, and
is bent upon revenge. After years away, the daughter of the
village’s former governor and governess comes back to
the village to learn more of her parents’ deaths (mysterious),
and it gradually emerges that certain villagers have been
killing people and burying them in barren soil at the behest
of an evil priest. The girl is repeatedly threatened, but
the Moon Boy appears and kills and saves her. In all he kills
four people, and the first three deaths are acted out by puppets.
Each time, we learn that the character has died offstage.
After we know his life has ended, the village grocer, Thenaki,
walks to the front of the stage and starts to narrate the
circumstances of his own death. At this point, the Moon Boy
comes on stage from one side; from the other, two female performers
carrying a puppet of the grocer between them, maybe a quarter
actual-size. The Moon Boy actor goes through a sequence of
subtle, characterful gestures – hunching, wiping his
brow, tipping his hat to the puppet, and so on – and
the two actresses manipulate the puppet so that it mirrors
him. It feels as though something is transferred from actor
to object. The actor exits, and as he narrates from offstage
how the Moon Boy threw him headfirst down a hole and buried
him alive, the puppet is turned violently upside down, and
its legs are made to kick for a while before going still.
A poisoning and a hanging are acted out in the same way, the
hanging particularly visceral as one of the puppet’s
hands reaches and pulls several times at the noose, repeatedly
catching and losing the rope.
Revenge of the Moon Boy played upon the tension arising from
what a community can and cannot say, and, in this scenario,
acting out what would otherwise be impossible to show, the
three puppet scenes were the alleviation of secrecy and suppression.
I’m not sure the other aspects of the play worked so
well, but these three scenes are what I’ll remember,
dark purviews of violence and death.
Laura
Griffin
The
Flickering Truths of a Cruel and Dirty Bitch
Camden People’s Theatre, London
Sprint Festival
May 2006
Reviewed by Beccy Smith
The unwieldy title provoked a resistant response in me, and
anyone else I mentioned this show to, but any concerns about
pretension were quickly dispelled by this disconcertingly
honest, original and excellently performed show. A one-hander
written and performed by Laura Griffin, the ‘monologue’
(although it was much more than that) charts in poetic form
the course of her obsessive love for an unsuspecting writer
hero. The story is delivered somewhere between the verbal
acrobatics and aural experimentation of spoken word poetry,
and dramatic cris de coeurs, wryly undermined by irresistibly
cheeky confidences in the audience. The fluctuations from
genuinely sympathetic emotional disclosure to histrionics
and socially alarming behaviour are subtly and dextrously
enacted, pulling us inexorably with Laura into the heart of
her obsession and depositing us, winded, on the other-self-righteous-side.
Griffin’s performance is phenomenal, completely engaged
and engaging, holding us with her on every step of this discomfiting
territory. The world she has invented, dominated by a surreally
sexual armchair/ letterbox which actually overshadows the
suspended suit jacket of the male object hung, muted, in one
corner of the staging aptly frames the imaginative distortions
of her tale. The puppetry is slightly rough around the edges:
a metaphorical cat transgresses the male/ female divide, both
sexual and mundane (there’s a lovely reveal in its belly)
and basic animation of the man’s clothes is dramaturgically
satisfying in its conjuring of his overwhelming absence/ presence.
But it’s transformed by the energy of the central performance
which vertiginously clings together all of the diverse elements
and wonderful moments of this piece. The subject matter is
a challenging one but the ingenuity and honesty of the writing
harbours real, refreshing insight on the thorny matters of
unrequited love; obsession; sexual power and politics with
which you can’t fail to engage. Raw passion, obvious
talent and an eye for theatrical eloquence: Griffin is one
to watch.
 Vélo
Theatre
There’s
a Rabbit in the Moon
Old
Market Arts Centre, Hove
Brighton Festival
May 2006
Reviewed by Penny Francis
A long-established company founded in the south of France
by Charlot Lemoine and Tania Castaing... Some years ago I
admired them for their delicacy, poetry and wit, and the sensitive
clowning of Charlot, the principal performer in all their
shows. Some will remember Envelopes et Deballages (Packing
and Unpacking) in which a postman finds all the packages on
his delivery bicycle (there’s always a cycle, a vélo,
of some kind) breaking open to fill the stage with a landscape;
and Appel d’Air (Call of the Wind – both inadequate
translations), a beautiful example of a theatre of objects.
The company has not lost its touch: Y’a un Lapin dans
la Lune (There’s a Rabbit in the Moon) is a delight
for children and parents alike (No adult without a child,
the programme says severely). It’s full of tension,
relaxed and inconsequential, solemn and funny. Silence features
loudly. The children were fascinated and still as mice.
They saw a slightly mad gentleman called Tomás Snout
who seemed to embody the night. All in black, with an old
dusty top hat, he steps out of a wardrobe into a high black
circular space. He produces from his pockets, and from a ‘soft
round white night’, a padded half moon strapped on a
trike, a number of objects with their attendant sounds –a
watch, a key, a tiny dancer, a Mercedes Benz, stars, a fish,
a trombone, black bits of paper which represent fears which
he will dispel. His angular, precise movements and melancholy,
anxious face are perfectly controlled, until he responds to
a child and smiles, his warmth brightening his eyes.
‘People whisper at night to be sure the stars won’t
hear them’ he says. It’s a very quiet show, and
is not afraid to use silence and subtleties of sound to great
theatrical effect. There are few words. ‘Sometimes night
can be a real nightmare!’ he says when a tiny house
gets invaded by a dog, a saw, a bigger fish. Halfway through
he tells the story of the Tin Soldier, and the fish which
has eaten him turns into a skeleton of itself. It has to be
buried; a coffin is prepared and the children are asked to
put in one of the black pieces of paper as one of their fears,
to be buried forever (their fears were quite heavy –
fear of losing a relative, fear of drowning). The coffin is
a battered instrument case and when closed the propeller on
the front revolves to drive it away.
We all leave when the Rabbit has been found in the Moon-Drum.
Its ears point the way out through the wardrobe and we exit
and hand back our pyjamas. Maybe the children will never again
be afraid of the dark, thinking of Mr. Snout and all his Things.
Or maybe they’ll think of the fish skeleton and the
buried fears, and shiver a little.
Armonico
Consort/ Orchestra of the Baroque
The
Fairy Queen
Theatre Royal, Brighton
Brighton Festival
May 2006
This year’s Brighton Festival featured a number of large-scale
‘total theatre’ ensemble productions which used
a wide variety of artforms – some more successfully
than others!
The Fairy Queen was one of the successes – a beautiful
piece of music theatre, staging of Purcell’s ‘semi-opera’
of seven mini-plays or masques inspired by Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a piece which has been
traditionally viewed as difficult to stage – although
this is in part due to our cultural obsession with linear
narrative: if one views it as being more like a book of poems
and sketches rather than a novel, it is less of a problem,
although it must be admitted that the complex stage directions
such as ‘in the distance swans are seen swimming under
the bridge of the left-hand river’ could be a bit of
a challenge!
Luckily, Armonico Consort’s Thomas Guthrie is far from
being a conventional director and he does not attempt any
sort of literal staging, but rather takes the admirable decision
to provide a theatrical framework and over-arching logic to
the piece by placing the action in what would have once been
called a lunatic asylum. This decision is inspired by an interest
in the life and work of painter Richard Dadds, one of the
Victorian fairy painters known for his Shakespearean fantasies
who was committed to Bedlam for killing his father. The stage
is simultaneously populated by the ‘real world’
inhabitants – doctors, nurses, patients – and
the spirit world of fairies, phantasms and imaginative creatures
from Shakespeare’s play and from Dadd’s paintings.
The questions it begs are: Who is madder, doctor or patient?
Who is dreaming whom? How do we tell reality from fantasy?
Where do material world and spirit world begin and end?
The piece is beautifully realised: an enormous silvery moon
at the rear of the stage provides a unifying scenographic
motif to the scenes that unfold, upright frames morph into
hospital beds, patients sing, nurses dance, doctors leap into
the audience to clown in the aisles. And all the while, the
fairy world weaves in, out and around the action…
There is a twenty-strong ensemble on stage: the baroque orchestra,
the consort who manage to combine wonderful singing with robust
physical performance, two dancers, and two aerial circus artists.
The baroque music is played on original instruments, a gloriously
delicate sound so different to most classical orchestration.
There is puppetry (although no puppeteers) and the weakest
link in this otherwise marvellous show is – yes, you’ve
guessed! – the puppetry. Two attractive enough hand-held
figures used towards the end of the piece lack animation,
the manipulation being extremely basic, and a larger puppet
that rises up to oversee the action seems to be nothing more
than the materials it is made of, and is similarly devoid
of life. The aerial sections in Fairy Queen are performed
by aerialists, and although all the Consort singer-performers
are expected to use physical skills the physical performance
element is enhanced by the inclusion of two trained dancers
– so why not employ puppeteers to ensure that this element
of the production is of equally high quality? This is not
the first time you will have heard this plea in Animations
and it won’t be the last! Guthrie is obviously interested
in the possibilities of puppetry within music theatre and
opera: we learn from his biog in the programme that he has
previously created a staged puppet version of Winterreise
for New Kent Opera. I’d advise him to follow the excellent
example of ENO in their employment of Blind Summit and consider
a collaboration with a puppet theatre company for his next
large-scale production!
Despite this one weak element (and unfortunate therefore that
I was reviewing with an Animations hat on!), The Fairy Queen
was a wonderful theatrical experience in which performers
and audience are united in a marriage of magical possibilities.
 Shofukutei
Showko
Show-Ko – Japanese Sit
Down Comedy
Marlborough
Theatre, Brighton
Brighton Festival Fringe
May 2006
One of the joys of festivals featuring hundreds of theatre
shows (and Brighton is second only to Edinburgh in the UK
festival league in the number of productions hosted) is the
discovery of the little gem, accidentally stumbled upon. This
was the one for me at Brighton! A show seen on a whim at a
50-seat theatre on a Saturday afternoon turned out to be one
of my top Brighton Festival experiences, a wonderful example
of Japanese Rakugo storytelling using object animation, puppetry
and ventriloquism. I arrived in ignorance and left amazed,
amused, delighted, entertained.
A woman in Kimono arrives on stage and sits on a silk cushion
on a bench at the front of the small stage. We learn that
the performance style we are going to see is Rakugo, or Japanese
sit-down comic storytelling (just as there is stand-up comedy
in the western countries, there is sit-down comedy in Japan).
Showko Shofukutei (aka Ayako Ono who has, I learn later, previously
performed with Norwich Puppet Theatre and Little Angel) has
the gift of the experienced storyteller.
She invites us warmly into her world: addressing the audience
directly and with confidence she explains that in sit-down,
the performer sits on their knees for the whole time when
he or she performs. She shows us a bamboo fan (Sensu) and
a paper napkin (Tenugui) and tells us that these are the only
props allowed. We are all, adults and children alike, captivated
by her smiling confidence and eager to see and hear more.
She then takes us on a trip around the world, the bamboo fan
magically morphing into landmark buildings and natural structures
– the Eiffel Tower, the leaning tower of Pisa, Mount
Fuji! There follows an audience participation song, which
we sing with great gusto. I am sitting alone and quite happily
join the four-year-olds in miming rabbit ears whilst shouting
‘Usagi’ at the appropriate places… This
first section also includes a version of a rather old shaggy
dog story about a woman who takes a job as a surrogate lion.
This is the only slight blip in the show, as it seems somehow
too grown-up a joke and over the head of many of the children
in the audience.
 Showko
Shofukutei leaves, and guest performer Mr Kakushow (a Raguko
master) arrives to tell us a ‘puppet raguko’ story
that is a sort of onstage Pokemon battle featuring brightly
coloured satin knee/foot puppets – the good guy has
a loveable-moppet demeanour, familiar from the Japanese ‘Anime’
cartoon tradition, whilst the baddies boast glowing white
grinning teeth and staccato jumps. It is a highly animated
performance in every sense of the word – Mr Kakushow
just about stays on his knees but with an enormous amount
of rolling and twisting, legs akimbo as the puppets attached
to them battle it out. It is hilarious, I am practically on
the floor I’m laughing so much (the four-year-olds might
in other circumstances be staring at me in amazement, but
they are so captivated by the onstage action and laughing
so hard themselves that I am luckily ignored).
Showko Shofukutei then returns, and with her is a suitcase
containing Ken, a ventriloquist dummy. Although everything
in this show is wonderful and astonishing, this section is
particularly extraordinary in its odd amalgam of Western and
Japanese entertainment traditions. Ken behaves in the precocious-child
mode familiar to Western audiences, but there are odd Japanese
Manga-style moments (such as a demented spinning of the head).
The three sections work excellently together, the audience
is well satisfied, and the end of the show is greeted with
tumultuous applause. What a way to spend a Saturday afternoon
– in the company of a fan that transform into famous
monuments, an imaginary rabbit, pokemon-style monsters on
the end of a leg and a kimono-clad dummy called Ken who thinks
he is in The Exorcist. And of course the two wonderful puppeteer-storytellers
– who could ask for more?
Told
By An Idiot
The Evocation of Papa Mas
The Corn Exchange, Brighton
Brighton Festival
May 2006
Reviewed by Beccy Smith
As
the spirit of carnival, all that is transformative, irreverent,
larger-than-life or -death, Papa Mas represents a tall order
to evoke, let alone to incarnate within the context of a ‘traditional’
theatre environment.
 Told
by an Idiot take on this challenge and attack it with gusto:
a sunken five-piece African band colonise the heart of the
stage; opposing choruses of rule (comic US-style police troopers
sporting grotesque fake noses) and misrule (a collection of
mischievous black demons complete with sexuality as pronounced
as their emphatic comment on the action) reinforce the dynamic
oppositions; whilst a community chorus of brightly coloured
rubber-gloved birds of all ages variously dance and sing in
the background, and giant puppets wade in to complete the
scene.
There’s a lot going on to enrich this archetypal tale.
The ‘story’, progressed through live music and
dance on a processional stage, is of the squire’s horsy
daughter, whose latent sensual side inspires her to reject
her wealthy suitor for the local poet and black popular hero,
both of whom are shot dead by her avenging father (with a
little help from the spurned lover) only to rise from the
dead to exact their revenge, at last dragging him and the
action down to Hell. Festive images abound: a baby bird is
born from an egg atop a coffin; a coffin becomes a bath to
wash away and unmask the hypocrisy of the murderous patriarch;
commedia style masks and large-scale carnival puppets explode
onto the stage.
Yet this superabundance, the company throwing everything at
the form, seemed somehow to emasculate the carnival’s
purity. There was a dilution – perhaps caused by the
theatre context itself. There was a conflicting variety of
performance modes: masked characters writ large overshadowing
human figures; the specificity of context suggested by skyscrapers
and sodium lamps in the design conflict with the mythical
tone of the content, whilst not being specific enough to give
a sense of any actual context, contemporary or otherwise;
the blood blossoms as a superbly theatrical device –
a red balloon – amongst the increasing presentationalism
of the performance. The crude specificity of references to
sexuality and race which peppered the dialogue felt uncomfortably
incongruous against the archetypal and philosophical frame.
There were arresting images, evocative physicality and some
great tunes, but the dancing never quite made it off the stage
and into the aisles. If such accomplished hands as Told By
an Idiot can’t lift this piece, the performance finally
left me wondering if it was asking the right questions of
this rich form and content. Perhaps what we should be asking
is whether or not carnival can really happen for a contemporary
audience for whom shared rules and communities no longer necessarily
exist (especially when in the context of a festival themselves)
and what role should it, or could it, play?
Victoria
Thierrée Chaplin and Aurélia Thierrée
Aurélia’s Oratorio
Lyric, Hammersmith
May 2006
Reviewed by Matthew Isaac Cohen
Aurélia’s Oratorio is both reinvention of the
European tradition of stage magic and a contemporary circus
spectacle, made for the proscenium stage, that integrates
clown/mime, aerial, contortion, manipulation and acrobatic
skills. Director and designer Victoria Thierrée Chaplin
and principal performer Aurélia Thierrée are
the daughter and grand-daughter of Charlie Chaplin and long-time
collaborators in their family circus Le Cirque Imaginaire.
Puppets and performing objects feature heavily, and through
cunning use of lighting, costume and set it is often hard
to say where the performer’s body ends and an extension
of it begins.
Though nominally inspired by the medieval trope of the World
Upside Down, Aurélia’s Oratorio is essentially
a non-stop sequence of two to five minute acts, most of them
involving some form of magical transformation. There is little
use of spoken dialogue, character or plot. Aurélia
Thierrée is teamed on stage with Puerto Rican born
dancer Jamie Martinez, whose dark sensuality and skills in
tango and rumba counterbalance the ethereal beauty of Thierrée.
Music by Vivaldi, Philip Glass and the New Age composers favoured
by Cirque du Soleil feature heavily.
Many of the most clever and entertaining are among the most
simple. Thierrée crosses the stage dragging an empty
shopping cart with one hand, with a huge pile of groceries
in the other. She drops a carton, gingerly picks it up, and
appears to toss it to the top of the pile where it sprouts
magically at the very top. One of the most memorable sequences
shows Thierrée arranging flowers in a vase upside down
so that their stems are up in the air; opens a window and
puts her washing out to dry and then waters her washing with
a watering can; call out for a ‘taxi’ and then
gets into an upside down chair borne on poles by two bearers
with shoes on their helmets.
Puppet fans will delight to a wordless tableau enacted behind
a white linen screen. Thierrée sits and knits as flat
animal creatures enter and exits. A sharp-toothed canine bites
her leg off and she hurriedly knits herself another. She lies
down to sleep. A giant, articulated at the shoulders and elbows
in wayang kulit style, enters and lifts her up and carries
her in gently rocking motion through the sky. He puts her
down and shoves her away. She tries to rejoin him but is rebuffed.
The linen screen begins to fall, slowly at first and then
more rapidly, and the giant humanoid melts into it. Would
that this scene went on forever!
Also impressive was a tableau on wheels of a booth show enacted
before an audience of puppets in which Thierrée’s
head within the booth sprouts and bounces around as a disembodied
performing object.
The lack of plot or through-line and a deficiency of emotional
expression make some moments drag: the aerial acrobatics feel
pro forma, the concluding scene in which a train appears to
go through a hole in Thierrée’s body is predictable.
Thierrée is credited in the programme as ‘actress’
but she is less actor than performer, always gliding on to
the next act. She lacks the glee that Chaplin was able to
inflect in his play with objects — such as his famous
potato fork dance of The Gold Rush. This is perhaps an unfair
comparison: this is Aurélia Thierrée’s
first major solo vehicle, and she will likely have a rich
and accomplished career ahead of her, building on her impressive
array of physical skills.
To the director’s credit, the three puppeteers and body
doubles, whose faces are barely glimpsed during this 80-minute
kaleidoscope, appear for the curtain call.
Ripstop
Productions
Little Fish Big Storm
Croydon Clocktower
May 2006
Reviewed by Marcus Reeves
Little Fish Big Storm begins in a magical garden where the
show’s performers encourage the young audience members
to plant and water magic seeds. It’s a charming beginning
that sets the tone for the next half hour as the audience
witness, and become part of, a spellbinding story.
As rain sets in (with the audience helping to provide the
raindrops) we shelter in a ‘shadow tent’, where
the story unfolds of an old man called Manu and a fish he
saves from the river. But this little fish is not what he
seems and in turn helps Manu save the world from a terrible
flood.
Frank Wurzinger is a versatile comic performer tackling roles
ranging from the thoughtful Manu to a stomping elephant, whilst
Bhavini Raval is an exuberant and playful narrator. They both
prove to be highly skilled puppeteers and bring the story
to life with infectious gusto.
The show’s design is witty and ingenious, with colourful
transparent shadow puppets by Bronia Evers creating a captivating
bevy of natural wonders all around the tent and amongst the
audience on small moveable screens.
The audience are encouraged to participate throughout in a
very natural way, making rivers and waves and help Manu make
his boat by chopping, sawing and drilling. Another unseen
but ever-present star of the piece is the atmospheric soundtrack
by Ansuman Biswas which complements the action perfectly with
simple sing-along songs and haunting instrumentals.
It’s worth noting that even with the show’s unusual
staging, the performance was made totally accessible to children
with learning and physical difficulties and that the company
made every effort to ensure the show was totally inclusive
and enjoyable for all. Overall, there is little to fault with
this enchanting, joyful production.
Improbable/National
Theatre of Scotland
Wolves In The Walls
Lyric, Hammersmith
April 200
Reviewed by Penny Francis
There be metaphors in them there walls too… We meet
a nuclear family in which the teenage kids (one boy one girl
– the heroine rather too physically advanced for this
kind of dreaming) have parents entirely wrapped up in their
own hobbies (jam-making and tuba-playing). Our heroine Lucy
(Frances Thorburn) is the younger of the two siblings and
one senses a solitude and a longing to share the life either
of her family or of the outside world. Her brother is a guitar-playing,
screen games-immersed geek (Ryan Fletcher – very convincing).
They share a rickety old house and Lucy knows there are wolves
in its walls which are going to emerge and finish off the
family. The scratchings and growlings are growing louder but
mum, dad and brother are too self-obsessed to listen or indeed
hear.
Wolves in the Wall is the first touring production of the
National Theatre of Scotland, a company run from Glasgow to
tour Scotland and beyond with only an administrative base
for a home. This comic, scary musical is gloriously designed
by Julian Crouch (of Improbable) in a style which is rough
and ready, inspired by the illustrations of the book of the
same name by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. It is good family
fun with terrific moments of invention, but not enough to
match the inspired designs and puppets. The wolves are hand-in-jaws
and body-over-the-head puppets with visible actors operating
underneath – actors, not puppeteers. They do not so
much manipulate as fling the wolves around, which is a pity
because they are wonderfully gangly, with jaws and shining
eyes that are sometimes quite threatening, but not nearly
threatening enough. Nor are they brought to life except in
odd moments. The day of the puppet has come to theatre all
right, but not the day of the puppeteer, alas.
Overall I was disappointed. To start with I have not read
the book and I could find no context for the piece. Trying
hard to read the score, I gathered it was set in the present
day, but that’s all. Perhaps that was the point; perhaps
it was a universal metaphor for lonely, frightened youth longing
for Life to break open the cocoon of adolescence, into which
the father and mother have obviously regressed. The wolves
shake the whole family out of their complacency, and there
are splendid chases in and around the house and its walls.
I liked the tension between the farce of the chase and the
underlying scariness, but neither farce nor melodrama quite
had the courage of their convictions and there was some internal
lack of logic in both dramaturgy and directing. The show is
enjoyable, but hasn’t quite gelled. Puzzling. But I
will take a second look when it tours again in the autumn…
Mishimou
The 3 Little Pigs
Royal Exchange, Manchester
June 2006
Reviewed by Rachel Riggs
Mishimou are dangerous! So said a fellow audience member after
the first show. ‘Mad and bad porno pig puppets cavort
in lewd sex acts!’ the headline would run in a national
tabloid newspaper. Mishimou’s new work begins innocently
enough in a surreal world with animated rain and a large male
puppet with an umbrella for a head then leaps into an abstract
adult vision of The Three Pigs.’
This is no fairy tale… the pigs live in three post boxes,
which are eventually blown apart by the male puppet (the wolf).
Between scenes, animated sequences created by Paddy Molloy
– with the traditional story crossed out – intersperse
the action. Each scene is a combination of front/back shadows
and/or 3D puppet play: for example, three women with lampshade
bottom halves float and jump. One is forced to give oral sex
to the large male puppet (presumably to show his nastiness
as later he puts the pigs in cages and tortures one with a
cigarette.) Then we see these same three women as shadows
drifting across an animated background in a beautiful image
which sticks in the mind. This multi-layered use of shadows
has some clever moments, such as the pigs running then flying
across a moving landscape before being murdered one by one.
Super Pig saves their bacon and for revenge they go and fuck
the man, literally….
There are some really strong, great ideas. Mishimou are certainly
developing an anarchic feminist style and are not afraid to
break the rules of traditional puppetry. It is fantastic to
see this kind of work being made, but a director’s eye
would have been a great benefit to pull the main thread of
ideas together. Maria Ratcliffe and Rachael Ayres are both
fine manipulators with strong presence and voice work, although
more meat (so to speak) is needed to flesh out the main characters
of the wolf and the pigs. Taboos are broken, but the context
is unclear. When we see the pigs, played as hand puppets,
there are some great moments of playing with the relationship
of performer and puppets. Showing much potential, Mishimou
need to get stuck into the semiotics of what they are saying
to an audience and push further with developing their unique
style.
Russian National Mail
Sputnik Theatre
BAC London
April 2006
Reviewed by Beccy Smith
Sputnik Theatre specialise in staging contemporary Russian
Drama, and with Russian National Mail they bring a piece of
work whose dramaturgy is notably foreign – it’s
hard to find much recent English work with such a clearly
absurdist aesthetic – but realised with such integrity
and commitment you can’t fail to engage. Ivan Sidorovich
is a lonely, elderly man, living out his final years in isolation
and poverty on the one-room canvass of a tiny stage where
he tracks listlessly from bed, to desk, to cupboard, to bed
again. It’s a tragic set-up and a moving one: Kevin
McGonagle’s performance is completely engaging, from
vague clicks and mumblings to flamboyantly theatrical oratory.
Sidorovich is a fascinating character whose resistance to
the catastrophe of his life and ability to laugh at himself
consistently subverts any clichéd expectations of the
role.
Sidorovich motors the drama via a series of bizarre letters
written to ‘real’ characters from his past and
his imagination (including Lenin; Trotsky, Vivien Leigh and
Queen Elizabeth II). Their replies, celebrating his life and
talents are clearly self-penned and delivered with hilarious
relish by McMonagle; but a combination of psychic energy and
absurdist logic liberate those figures onto the stage where
their own agenda – a nefarious struggle over who will
most benefit from Sidorovich’s will (his imminent death
hangs over the entire piece as a satisfyingly dramatic Damiclean
sword) – colonises his dreams. It’s an unwieldy
premise, but strong all-round performances and direction facilitate
a playful suspension of disbelief and the unlikely collection
of characters add colour and comedy to the tragic frame.
However it’s through the excellent puppetry work of
Darren East and Zoë Hunter (of Unpacked) that the emotional
heart, and theatrical punch, of the piece is expressed. A
rag and paper puppet of Sidorovich’s lost love, delicately
manipulated, brings an unexpectedly tender tone, offsetting
the intellectualism of the premise beautifully, and wonderfully
apt in the context of his scruffy apartment and the emotional
displacement which seem to characterise his dealings with
the world. A stroke of theatrical genius in the portrayal
of death using one fabulously otherworldly foot was greeted
with gasps of satisfaction from the audience.
The programme cites a communist critique, which somewhat passed
me by (the collapsing of a political dialectic through the
imaginative equivalence of Lenin with Vivien Leigh perhaps?)
however it wasn’t missed in this imaginatively directed
and excellently performed piece of theatrical new writing.
An unexpected gem.
Lara
Foot Newton and Lionel Newton
Hear and Now
Gate Theatre, London
June 2006
Reviewed by Seonaid Goody
Understanding the evolution of the process which led to Hear
and Now perhaps goes some way to understanding the convoluted
nature of this piece. Inspired by sketches inspired by stories
which offered a springboard for ‘image’ workshops,
it seems that the original plot structure may have been subordinated
by a predilection for visual symbolism in this play. The point
of the visual imagery however – doors and books littering
the stage – is lost in the dense script which seemed
reluctant to offer the same emphasis, and ultimately the symbolic
function which these images may be intended to convey is incomprehensible
to an audience who seem unaccustomed to seeking out symbolic
meaning.
From the opening scene in which a crippled man, Jan (Lionel
Newton), with puppet legs hanging from his waist shuffled
toward us, to the close when he was joined by a woman, Elizabeth
(Denise Newman), both staring hazily into the ether, it was
virtually impossible to decipher any greater sense of meaning
than a crude expression of the perversities of love, and even
in that analysis it is difficult to provide greater specificity.
The script is made up of a series of conversations between
these two protagonists who have mutual fascinations with the
people living around them and who over a period of time (weeks?
years?) fall in love with one another. The unremarkable script
was never brought off the page by either of the two actors
and their extreme emotional outbursts sat uncomfortably alongside
this and read as a superficial device to give some shape to
a play with little substance.
In watching this play I couldn’t help but question whether
any of those involved – actors and director, had managed
to extract some meaning from it. Interestingly, the co-writers
also make up one half of the cast and the director, which
begs the question of whether the process of developing this
piece lacked an objective perspective. Much of the script
is delivered to the fourth wall but it was never clear who
was being addressed when this device was used and what the
role of the audience was intended to be.
The object manipulation in the play was handled clumsily throughout,
and what should have been imaginative flourishes in the use
of miniature doors and windows became annoying distractions.
The use of these framing devices created the sense of claustrophobia
well, but at the same time made for a play which was literally
static and trapped within the walls of a small apartment.
I felt concerned for the puppet legs rather than for the crippled
character, and moments of transforming from being unable to
stand to standing on normal legs were unexplained. The humanette
bed was pleasing but such techniques were not explored at
other moments. I have real difficulty in justifying the use
of puppetry at all in this play as it offered no sense of
parallel dimensions nor were the puppetry elements used to
tell extraordinary tales; as a result the medium seemed to
be exploited as a gimmick rather than an integral and essential
means of expressing the story.
Hear and Now is a triumphantly forgettable piece of theatre,
in which the weakness of script, actors, design and direction
seem to have combined to create a confusion for both those
on stage and the audience. It is laden with symbolism which
is never realised. As I left the theatre I was overcome by
the feeling that I’d slept through the previous ninety
minutes.
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