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class="style2">Reviews Archive <span class="style4">Summer & Autumn 2010</span></a><br /> </p> <p align="left" class="style2"><a href="archiveedinburgh2010.html" class="style2">Reviews Archive <span class="style4">Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2010</span></a><br /> </p> <p align="left" class="style2"><a href="archivespring0910.html" class="style2">Reviews Archive <span class="style4">Spring 2010</span></a><br /> </p> <p align="left" class="style2"><a href="archiveautwin0910.htm" class="style2">Reviews Archive <span class="style4">Autumn-Winter 2009-2010</span></a><br /> </p> <p align="left" class="style2"><a href="archive08.htm" class="style2">Reviews Archive <span class="style4">2008</span></a></p> <p align="left" class="style2"><a href="archive09.htm" class="style2">Reviews Archive <span class="style4">2009</span></a><br /> </p> <p align="left" class="style2">&nbsp;</p> </td> <td width="20" valign="top" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><p>&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p></td> <td valign="top" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <h1><strong> Total Theatre Reviews Autumn-Winter 2009-2010</strong></h1> <b><p>Natasha Davis <br><i>Asphyxia</i> <br>Camden People's Theatre | Sprint Festival <br>11 March 2010</b> <br><br> <p><img src='../images/reviewsmarch/natashadavis_asphyxia.jpg' alt='Natasha Davis, Asphyxia' title='Natasha Davis, Asphyxia' padding='0 0 5px 5px' align='right'>A grid of votive candles on a trolley, a table strewn with faded family photographs, a set of silver scales hung from the ceiling, a 'confessional box' of backlit drapes - the pre-set for <i>Asphyxia</i> is less a stage set than a sculpted environment, awaiting occupation. <p>The show unfolds as an archaeology of objects: a vintage gas mask, a jar of strawberries, a wooden box containing something very precious... far more than mere theatrical 'prop', each object has a thousand stories to tell - tales of migration, bereavement, love, and abuse. <p>Close to the audience, Natasha Davis enacts disturbing rituals: a mouthful of torn photographs swollen with water that engorge her cheeks and jaw; strawberries ripped apart, their juice a blood-like smear across the face. Mid-stage is the arena for a series of stylized movement motifs; upstage, she's in the land of the gods, a silent and mysterious presence. <p>On screen, low-tech live projection of the family photographs contrasts with pre-filmed moving image of a shrouded figure's slow descent down a stone staircase towards the sea. In every image presented, live or screened, we seem to be asked to reflect on the binary divides: of life and death, black and white, movement and stillness, sound and silence. There are many moments infused with grace and purpose in a piece that is visually beautiful, and brave enough to be quiet and slow when it needs to be (this complemented by Bob Karper's sensitive sound design). <p>Some of the spoken text is a little overwritten, as when a lovely reflection on crossing borders with three passports - the British passport is greeted with a smile, the Serbian and Croatian passports with frowns - is weakened by unnecessary musing on what this all might mean. And I am at times a little nervous for the performer, who occasionally slips slightly in intention. But these are small quibbles... <p>Underlying it all is the question of 'heart': Does absence make the heart grow fonder? How do we weigh up our feelings? How to honour our memories of people and things that are 'lost' to us? And how do you grieve someone who did you harm in this life? <p>Finally, we come to the heart's desire. What does Natasha want more than anything else? A tiger would be nice, she thinks - and we cannot help but agree. A tiger would be nice. <p><b>Dorothy Max Prior</b><br><br> <p><b>Spike Theatre <br><i>Top Of The World</i> <br>Unity Theatre Liverpool <br>25 February 2010</b> <br><br> <p><img src='../images/reviewsapril/spiketheatre_topoftheworld.jpg' alt='Spike Theatre, Top of the World' title='Spike Theatre, Top of the World' padding='0 0 5px 5px' align='right'>The gruelling nature of Edmund Hillary's ascent of Everest alongside his sherpa Tenzing Norgay has of course been documented and told before. Spike Theatre Company set out to add personality and humour to the well-known story and they achieve their aim with rations to spare. <p>The three actors use puppetry, ropes, ladders and an apparent genuine understanding of and respect for both the real life characters and the natural landscape they faced. Taking imagery of the event itself from the documentary <i>The Conquest of Everest</i> is a simple device to ensure that the audience don't lose sight of the suffering and sacrifice that the climb involved, but Spike's light-hearted approach never detracts from the physical and emotional toll the achievement took on the men. <p>Imaginative use of props and great performances from Jamie Wood and Eugene Salleh powerfully recreate the awesome beauty of the landscape and the courage needed to overcome it. Spike then delve even deeper with the help of Chris Tomlinson as John Hunt, the man who never made it to the top. He also takes on the other roles and provides the required sound effects. His lengthy prose concentrates on the trust, comradeship and fun that kept the expedition going and much of the emotional development of the piece relies on the audience investing in this sense of fraternity. A question and answer session is used intelligently to further involve the audience and add to the moments of outrageous comedy which speckle the play. <p>An original script, fluid direction and gripping performances ensure that the story itself is never overshadowed by Spike's desire to entertain. You walk away with the sense of extreme human endeavour intact but with an added understanding of what could drive any of us to such craziness. <p><b>Paul Tarpey</b><br><br> <p><b>Dominion Dance Company, <i>Repress</i> <br>dANTE OR dIE, <i>Side Effects</i> <br>adc, <i>Girl Talk</i> <br>The Place | Resolution! 2010 <br>18 February 2010</b> <br><br> <p>Adc's fluid dance to African music, <i>Girl Talk</i>, shows three women playfully competing. It's physically feisty but has a sense of vulnerability, as figures seem to lose confidence then be reassured. Chrissie Adesina's choreography is vivid, with still tableaux and energetic bursts. The last piece, to 'Adukbe' by Baka Beyond ('the original African-Celtic crossover band'), was uplifting, although the final bow looked a bit tired, a slightly awkward glimpse of anticlimax. But there was no doubting the virtuosity, sharp contrasts and rhythm in this performance by Annie Deakin-Foster, Amanda Thompson and Ria Uttridge. <p> <i>Repress</i> by Dominion Dance Company, which opened the evening, is also a three-hander (or rather a six-hander, a six-footer and a multiplication). The choreography uses all combinations, from the initial solitary figure walking diagonally across the stage, to a triangle, solos and duets, drawing out synchrony and tension. The movement is evocative - sometimes a performer holds another's leg, dragging them slightly, as if dragging them back from loneliness. However, the storyline was not clear. Bodies sagged elegantly, but the overall shape of the piece could also sag. It was nonetheless an assured performance by Adam Rutherford, who also choreographed, Chris Bradley and Tracey Stanton. <p> <i>Side Effects</i>, the middle piece, was more overtly theatrical. Stories spoken and recorded, singing, bright costumes, jazzy design and medicinal props make it feel more like physical theatre with snatches of dance. dANTE OR dIE use medical histories or diaries of illness, starting with a five-year-old who is given chloroform for an eye operation and has nightmares of soldiers. Funny touches include the waltz between an older woman (Betsy Field) and a character determinedly taking acne remedies. Two men (Gareth Mole and Terry O'Donovan) rush to rescue a fainting hospital visitor (Laure Bachelot), but each time she picks herself up just before they reach her. The piece doesn't shirk: love, anal fissure and living in Hackney are juxtaposed. And there were caring moments of stillness, as pain was shared, which was something of a common thread through the evening. <p> <b>Charlotte Smith</b><br><br> <p><b>Uninvited Guests <br><i>Love Letters Straight From the Heart</i> <br>The Basement, Brighton <br>14 February 2010</b> <p><img src='../images/reviewsmarch/uninvitedguests_lovelettersstraightfromtheheart.jpg' alt='Uninvited Guests, Love Letters Straight From the Heart' title='Uninvited Guests, Love Letters Straight From the Heart' padding='0 0 5px 5px' align='right'>Richard Dufty and Jessica Hoffman created this lovely, loved-up show in 2007 and it's toured extensively ever since. Brighton's Basement was canny to book it for Valentine's Day. <p>The set-up appears simple: two long tables with a central walkway, a table at each end with a computer and music system, and a performer sat at each. It's like a face-off between DJs. The audience has been asked to request music that means something to them, or to the person they have come with, and to give a dedication in whatever form of words they feel goes with that particular piece of music for that particular listener. Much of the content of the show is therefore down to audience input; we have a personal stake and a deeper level of anticipation. <p>Our songs and words are cleverly interwoven with set pieces performed with vigour by Dufty and Hoffman. They chase each other round the tables like teenagers; Dufty dances (well, moves dramatically) to 'Lust For Life' - voted for by the audience. Lyn Gardner's lot choose 'Hounds of Love'. They end up with a slow dance, which we are all invited to join. <p>And throughout the 75 minutes our dedications roll; quietly read, absorbed by us all in our anonymity. Some are incredibly moving, some are funny. For me, those addressed to people not in the room are most affective - dedications to past loves or the remembered dead. Perhaps having the show on Valentine's Day made it a bit too couple-based and the dedications subsequently overly romantic. <i>Love Letters</i> has had superlative reviews which, in most cases, have seen audiences blubbing almost from the start. We didn't collectively blub so much in Brighton, but then, as the choice of Iggy Pop over Kate Bush may suggest, we were made of quite tough stuff. <p><b>Lisa Wolfe</b><br><br> <p><b>Miracle Theatre<br> <i>The Revenge of Rumpelstiltskin</i><br> Beechwood Hall, Cooksbridge<br> 30 January 2009</b><br><img src="../images/reviewsjan/miracletheatre_therevengeofrumpelstiltskin.jpg" title='Miracle Theatre, The Revenge of Rumpelstiltskin' alt='Miracle Theatre, The Revenge of Rumpelstiltskin' align="right" /><br> <i>The Revenge of Rumpelstiltskin</i> is Miracle Theatre's ode to the pantomime of the 19th century. Under the guise of 'Mr Samuel Ffitch's portable theatre', the company presented their own original and very eccentric version of the old Brothers Grimm tale. The stage is designed as a set-within-a-set, the outside an authentic warren of backstage wood panelling with dressing-room doors and the paraphernalia of 19th century theatre. Neatly tucked inside is the proscenium, with brightly-painted, authentic-looking pantomime backdrops and props.<br> From the start, the company stumble and bicker around the outer set, preparing for the performance. Once on the 'real' (inner) stage all is calm and composed, though with panicked glances into the wings.<br> The stage performance is a well-researched representation of traditional late Regency Pantomime, its movement and mannerisms, especially the wonderful Captain's swagger and princely walk from Ben Dyson. Also impressive was Tom Adams' imposing queen (the obligatory dame), with quick costume and set changes and many a boo, hiss, and 'it's behind you' from the audience.<br> Jason Squibb makes a gratifyingly angular and goblin-like Rumpelstiltskin, while Sally Crooks plays the spoilt princess like a modern LNDN diva. The local audience appreciated the postmodern twist afforded by her Catherine Tate-style characterisation, amongst other contemporary references.<br> Standout set pieces included Tom Adams singing whilst undressing in the wings as Crooks attempted to fool the audience into thinking she was singing by miming along. Also of note was Jason Squibb's transition from boo-inducing ogre to sensitive, compassionate soul.<br> The piece was accompanied by recorded harpsichord music, which I felt would have better fit the period experience had it been played live. Proceedings were rounded off by a singalong to 'Hot Coddlings', Joe Grimaldi's signature song. <br> This show was seen towards the end of an extensive national tour which, over many months, took in established provincial venues and village halls throughout the land (the latter as part of the company's Rural Touring programme). We thus saw a very tired-looking company packing their huge set into the back of the van as we happily headed home.<br> <b>James F Foster</b><br><br> <p><strong>Little Angel Theatre<br> <i>Petrushka</i><br> Little Angel Theatre<br> 29 January 2010</strong><br><br> Watching <i>Petrushka</i> by and at the Little Angel Theatre in Islington with a crowd of children was an uncommonly satisfying experience. Everything about the show and the theatre seemed perfectly tailored for the writhing and excitable audience of local school children - from the closely packed pews with 'child priority' marked clearly at the accessible isle-ends; the generously-tempered venue staff; and the larger-than-life appearance of the human actors who dance and spin their way into a performance space otherwise scaled for the proportions of childhood. The performers appear alongside a cast of puppets in the show, which features the delightfully fractious music from the eponymous Stravinsky ballet and a poetic storytelling text from John Agard.<br> Seemingly made of the simulacra of childhood memory, <i>Petrushka</i>'s deftly virtuosic imagery dances breezily across the stage; soaring song-sheets, dancing stars and fluttering flags are among this scenography of the imagination. The sweet-hearted sparkle of it all caused a hundred delighted children to cling to one another and shout delightedly at the brilliance of the stage, where their interjections were accommodated with generosity and care by a sure-handed ensemble. <i>Petrushka</i>, in Little Angel's telling, is a simple epic caught with extraordinary vibrancy by a host of colourful puppets and glittering props, which are animated and lit with understated accomplishment.<br> This work is old-fashioned in the honourable sense: always pointing to the magic of the puppet rather than the virtuosity of the puppeteers; uninterested in cultivating the cynical smirks of attendant adults like the too-smart animation of big-screen children's films; acknowledging the sharp-eyed intellect of the young audience by casting them as complicit with - rather than duped by - the cleverness of the image-making and the anarchic naughtiness of the irrepressible hero. In its refusal to treat the children of the audience as less sophisticated than the adults, <i>Petrushka</i> removes these barriers of child/adulthood; we all in the audience find ourselves transported to childhood, and so this simulacrum is transformed into the quality and depth of an original. <br> <strong>Eve Wedderburn</strong> <br> <br> <p><b>Kneehigh Theatre<br> <i>Hansel and Gretel</i><br> Bristol Old Vic<br> 23 January 2010<br><br></b> The show opens with an intricate set decked with ropes, pulleys and seemingly extraneous objects that Heath Robinson would have recognised with pride. It is a visual treat and Michael Vale's design is beautifully executed with objects descending from an open fronted cage of ladders surrounding the stage to form a series of outlandish traps in the style of the board game Mousetrap. This is complimented by evocative lighting and a live musical score from a wide selection of traditional stringed instruments that heightens, terrifies and celebrates without overriding the action. <br> Yet action is what the first half lacks: we are introduced to the characters, including two beautifully sympathetic puppet Hens, yet despite the onset of a prolonged famine that brings the family to ruin there is little dramatic tension. The antagonist is an implied, unseen, unquestionable force which leaves the characters nothing to do but attempt survival. This feels an issue particularly because the company's device of showing the 'good times' before presenting two years worth of 'bad times' means there is a large amount of extraneous material which slows the pace. At last, the classic tale starts with the family already reduced to penury and gets right to the substance of the story. <br> This second half, by contrast, is energetic, darkly magical, and genuinely funny. Carl Grose's malevolent Witch and the wildly unstable Bird played by Giles King bring genuine evil to the stage - something to push the action forward, something for Hansel to succumb to and for Gretel to plot against. There is a wonderful sequence where the company mimes the act of cooking and consuming a huge feast as the Witch fattens up the children and the ensuing entrapment brings about applause that is undercut, with perfect timing, by a reminder that we are celebrating cannibalism. Of course everyone knows how the story ends and the eventual reunion is handled simply and with care. <br> The excited praise from the younger audience members overhead on leaving the theatre clearly demonstrated their enjoyment, and overall the show worked well across ages as a playful, if flawed, re-imagination of a classic fairy tale. <br> <b>Edward Rapley</b><br><br> <p><b>Nic Green<br> <i>Trilogy</i> <br>Barbican<br> 22 January 2010</b><br><br> Much of what was talked about before the show was the exciting spectacle that takes place in Part One of <i>Trilogy</i>, where fifty women of all ages, shapes and sizes take to the stage and dance together in an act of pride and ownership over their own bodies. As soon as I witnessed this, I understood why it whipped up such a storm. The bravery and communion of all those that danced that evening charged me and many others that filled the Barbican main stage auditorium with an instant reason to celebrate. <br> After Part One, there was an incredibly rousing energy reverberating through the bar area. Tears, hugs and smiles were already being exchanged between groups of people who had come to witness the event, and there was an unmistakeable sense that we had all shared something in that room. It generated faith in whatever Green was about to present to us next, because we had just witnessed the beautiful positivity the first part had produced.<br> For Part Two, Green projected extracts of a debate that took place in New York in 1971, that saw the likes of Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Norman Mailer take to the stand to debate the nature of the women's liberation movement. This was positioned as a backdrop to a chorus of dancers, comprised of four women and one man, who through shared creative expressions (individual and synchronised dance routines and poetic, fast and brash outbursts of speech), interrogated the arguments presented within the debate and brought the issue into the reality of 2010. <br> Part Three was, in a sense, an invite for everyone in the auditorium to get involved with these creative dissents. Two female performers introduced the audience to a website called <a href='http://www.makeyourownherstory.org'>www.makeyourownherstory.org</a>. The women in the audience were being encouraged to engage in a range of suggested activities published on the website that were said to aid the process of gaining ownership and celebration of all things female. <br> With this sentiment as the foundation, two female performers then proceed to stand vulnerably - but proudly - naked in front of the audience, inviting all the women to join them naked on stage, standing shoulder to shoulder to sing 'Jerusalem'. Those audience members who do not participate, either because they choose not to, or because they are not female, are invited to share in the singing; uniting the whole auditorium in a mass celebration.<br> It was positive and it was fun. Certainly alone, it is not world-changing, but as many wise women and men have discovered - to achieve change, one must first become the change you want to see. <br> <b>Alexander Roberts</b> <br><br> <p><b>Compagnie Ieto<br> <i>Ieto</i><br> Purcell Room | London International Mime Festival<br> 28 January 2010 </b> <br><br> <img src="../images/reviewsjan/compagnieieto_ieto.jpg" title='Compagnie Ieto, Ieto' alt='Compagnie Ieto, Ieto' align="right" /> Two boys and a bench; they sit and wait - but not for long. From inertia, action springs. One jumps up, offers a sprightly acrobatic riff of tumbles, twists and turns and sits back down. The gauntlet has been thrown. The other jumps up and takes his 'turn', performed with a veneer of humility, but also with a lingering, impish edge of one-upmanship. The game has begun. <br> A strong relationship quickly develops. Through their conversational spins and springs, a brotherly dynamic emerges. One seems younger: flighty, skittish and pushing against the contrasting stability of his elder sibling. Climbing nimbly up the vertical bench, he reaches the top and his comrade-in-arms musters every ounce of self-restraint not to push him off. He fails. The other falls. Yet through their battles, a feeling of warmth and union prevails. <br> Performing with astounding physical control, agility and strength, these chaps do things with a bench that you certainly couldn't do on a bicycle. Their risks feel recognisable: treading the tops of their towers, their bodies live out the journey of our lives - generating a challenge, rising to this challenge and facing the risks in their path. When they succeed, we applaud them; when they fall, we applaud them. The child in the audio track states that 'the game is everything'; indeed it is and Jonathan Guichard and Fnico Feldmann play it exceptionally well. <br> In their hands - and feet - simple planks of wood seem to be every bit as alive as they are. As the duo master one bench, one gives way to two, two to three, until they fill the stage. Benches are their building blocks - alongside rope and sticks - and the basis of their adventures, forming structures that see the pair gliding, swinging, sliding between and around the surfaces of their scenographic foundations. As they wonder what the benches can do, so we marvel at the hypnotic power of their marvellous performance. <br> Once they have left, what remains is a monolithic structure; part-boat, part-harp, part avant-garde climbing frame. From nothing, something comes. We feel pride having watched these men, bit-by-bit, with these benches, steadily build their dreams. <br> Directed by Christian Coumin, this production is acrobatic theatre at its finest. They bring an exhilarating sense of our own physical potential. Beautiful, moving and dangerous, Compagnie Ieto reinvent the possibilities of life in bold strokes of lyrical imagery and movement. Mesmerising. <br> <b>Marigold Hughes</b><br><br> <p><b>O Ultimo Momento / Jo&atilde;o Paulo Dos Santos<br> <i>Contigo</i><br> Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House | London Interntational Mime Festival<br> 22 January 2010 </b><br><br><img src="../images/reviewsjan/oultimomomento_contigo.jpg" title='O Ultimo Momento / Jo&atilde;o Paulo Dos Santos, Contigo' alt='O Ultimo Momento / Jo&atilde;o Paulo Dos Santos, Contigo' align="right" /> The stage is simple: a white pole in a white square; to the front, another small white square. Dos Santos appears upstage right, sitting on a chair, quiet, docile, bored perhaps. A deep thrumming sound intimates something beginning. Led by the light, he gradually discovers the space, unwilling as yet to relinquish the comfort of his chair for too long. The small white square is a cloth. Inside it is discovered a black ball, and so is introduced the theme of gravity. <br> Now the pole comes into focus and dos Santos plays with the chair and pole, flying, leaping, falling - how many ways can you sit on a chair, or jump from a chair to the pole! Nothing is repeated as his fantasy unfolds in the pole chair game. <br> With flawless timing the scene is over and the verticality of the pole comes to the fore. The chair is put at the top and dos Santos flies up and down the pole, with the audience gasping as he drops the ball from the top and slides, upside down, catching it centimetres from the bottom in a perfectly timed move. <br> The show unfolds like the growth of an exquisite plant - from first leaves, to stem, to flowers, it then fades away like a dying bloom, its ripening seeds dropping to the earth for winter gestation. The chair returns, the ball is enfolded in the white cloth, and dos Santos returns to his starting point, sitting on the chair, quiet, still. <br> The whole performance is intricately interwoven with its musical score and lighting. Masterfully directed by Rui Horta, at no time did he allow us to indulge in moments of outstanding beauty or finesse. Nothing is cheapened by over repetition; moments are left for us as longings for more, more... <br> <b>Philip Beavan</b><br><br> <p><b>Pathosformel<br> <i>The Timidity of Bones</i><br> ICA | London International Mime Festival</br> 24 January 2010 </b><br><br> In 25 minutes this piece traces a journey from primordial soup to human relationships, combining the daydreaming pleasures of shadow theatre with a physically troubling soundtrack.<br> On a large white illuminated screen, dark shapes appear and disappear. At first the images are suggestive of life under a microscope: a long dark blob and a cluster of bubbles float upwards. Later, we start to see human anatomy in these shapes - perhaps that's an ulna bone, with the impression of knuckles beneath. Perhaps it's a moving X-ray image, or a body floating to the surface of a pool of milk, or archaeological remains emerging from white sand. <br> Eventually, there is a sense of three-dimensional bodies behind the screen, making impressions in the taut, stretchy fabric: the muscles of a torso pulse, an arm wraps around a waist. A series of black dots appear and are quickly erased as someone rolls their vertebrae upwards. These partial images powerfully evoke the sensation of touch in darkness.<br> The rhythmic soundscape of mechanical and synthesised textures recalls Thomas Turine's live-from-the-laptop sound for <i>Kefar Nahum</i> (Mossoux-Bont&#233;, also in LIMF 2010) and the work of Scott Gibbons for Societas Raffaello Sanzio's <i>Divine Comedy</i>. (There is a connection between the two Italian companies: <i>The Timidity of Bones</i> was awarded a prize in the Sezione Autonoma festival organised by SRS).<br> The interplay between images and sound is crucial in directing the mood. Sometimes, it is illustrative: a random spattering of dark points is accompanied by a rapid crackle, like a Geiger counter. But the base note of low-frequency rumbling induces a feeling of deep unease - at least in this listener - and imposes a solemnity that is not necessarily intrinsic to the imagery. <br> As the images become more recognisably human, they spark curiosity about the unseen acrobatics of the (presumably suspended) performers. It will be interesting to see what this young company does next. This very specialised technique may not support a longer show, but it suggests some powerful imaginations at work. <br> <b>Eleanor Margolies</b><br><br> <b> <p>Circus Klezmer<br> Queen Elizabeth Hall | London International Mime Festival<br> 23 January 2010</b><br><br> <img src="../images/reviewsjan/circusklezmer.jpg" title='Circus Klezmer' alt='Circus Klezmer' align="right" /> At 7.20pm on Saturday I was in a foul mood. By 7.30pm I had taken my seat for Circus Klezmer and begun what turned into 75 minutes of laughing, smiling, clapping and a little bit of foot-tapping - quite a turn around. It began as we entered the theatre, where jolly music and greetings from the cast made you feel like an old friend and a welcomed guest. I took my seat and watched as a young lady behind me was wooed by the village idiot: grabbing her arm and her bag, he moved her to the front row, where she became his love interest for the duration of the show.<br> The show is set in an Eastern European village, where the villagers are preparing for a traditional Jewish wedding. That's about it as far as the narrative goes: there are a series of mishaps along the way; domestic arguments, lost rings, scattered invitations. All of it set to live klezmer music, constant throughout the performance, which keeps the atmosphere alive, and the party going. As far as circus goes, there's acrobatics, comedy juggling, an argument turned into a dance; the bride-to-be does some impressive acrobatics with a swing and some lengths of cloth. This is no grand circus spectacle, but the company are certainly likeable - they're warm and entertaining and manage to create a real community spirit. <br> Another audience member is plucked from his seat and tied to a chair whilst a woman performs the most un-sexy striptease imaginable. It's all in good humour, as he's discovered by the woman's husband and hidden with a cardboard box over his head. He's later given a violin and awkwardly joins the band where he remains for the rest of the show. The inclusion of the audience really adds to the celebratory feel of the performance. By the time the happy end comes, the unexpected participants are made to feel like the stars of the show. This show is really a grand celebration of people, skills, energy and fun.<br> <b>Marie Kenny </b><br><br> <p><b>Okidok<br> <i>Slips Inside</i><br> Purcell Room, Queen Elizabeth Hall | London International Mime Festival<br> 20 January 2010</b><br><br> <img src="../images/reviewsjan/okidok_slipsinside.jpg" title='Okidok, Slips Inside' alt='Okidok, Slips Inside' align="right" /> <i>Slips Inside</i> began its life as a street show (called <i>Slips Everywhere</i>), which has enjoyed great success on the outdoor circuit. It's a simple slapstick set up, with Xavier Bouvier and Beno&#238;t Devos falling over each other and deftly landing on their feet at the last minute - quelle surprise! The opening moments see our heroes swagger on stage in boxing boots and white bathrobes, looking very pleased with themselves and their magnificent bodies. A few simple smirks and an impressive moonwalk and the audience is eating out of their skilful hands.<br> If only the content of the piece was as punchy as the proficiency we are presented with, <i>Slips Inside</i> would be a winner. As it is, we are left with two boy-men repeating the same bum and willy joke again and again. And again. After five minutes, the duo disrobes to reveal their unsexy white briefs. The skinnier of the two's briefs are stuffed to bursting - and the humour, ideas and narrative never develops past this most basic of ideas. Instead we are subjected to a barrage of toilet humour jokes and overlong improvised sketches making fun of the audience.<br> There are fleeting moments of notable acrobalance and mime. Devos scrambles up Bouvier and deftly hangs out on top of his head. Later, he flips himself over Bouvier's head as if an afterthought. They make fun of classical mime, effortlessly creating the clich&#233;d glass box and swiping their hands through it. I'm just not sure why I'm watching any of it. As a twenty-minute performance outdoors, I'm certain <i>Slips Everywhere</i> is hugely entertaining and punchy. Slipping it inside as a ninety minute theatrical journey, the work just doesn't hold up and instead seems humourless, unoriginal and formulaic.<br> <b>Terry O'Donovan</b><br><br> <p><strong>Ockham's Razor<br> <i>The Mill</i><br> Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House | London International Mime Festival<br> 19 January 2010</strong><br><br> <img src="../images/reviewsjan/ockhamsrazor_themill.jpg" title='Ockham's Razor, The Mill' alt='Ockham's Razor, The Mill' align="right" /> The stage is dimly lit. From the darkness a machine is revealed: a huge wheel made from wood and steel is suspended at the centre of the stage. Four people power the wheel; one inside and one on top, while thick ropes lead to cogs and two more performers - together they keep it turning. They move steadily, a routine sets in; we don't know what they're working towards but it appears that their collective job is simply to keep the human-sized hamster wheel turning. Directions are transmitted by a disembodied female voice through a loudspeaker, with the workers rotating positions when instructed to do so. The rotations continue, with the shift change the only opportunity for the four to show some individuality, until suddenly a fifth person is added to the mix. The routine unravels and the system they've created breaks down. <br> Ockham's Razor blend their aerial circus skills with creative physical theatre. Their physical labour is a visual metaphor for the workplace, the mind-numbing daily routine. With the introduction of a fifth person and the system breakdown, comes the notion of rebellion, a possible alternative. As the complex system of ropes and pulleys falls apart, personalities are set free. Imagination comes into play, tightropes are walked, swings are created in mid-air; the vast white rope joins them together as their dreams are set free during rest period.<br> This modern circus piece really builds momentum as all five performers utilise the giant wheel, four of them dangling off it, standing on it, whilst one runs inside. They create incredible, striking images continuously. The only small disappointment in this piece is the fight scene, which seems awkward and undeserving of time and energy in an otherwise spectacular performance.<br> <b>Marie Kenny</b><br><br> <p><strong>Etgar Theatre<br> <i>Eshet</i><br> Purcell Room, Southbank Centre | London International Mime Festival <br> 16 January 2009 </strong> <br><br> <img src="../images/reviewsjan/etgartheatre_eshet.jpg" title='Etgar Theatre, Eshet' alt='Etgar Theatre, Eshet' align="right" /> Four mannequins dressed in men's shirts sit at a large table; they have detachable faces - their fixed glares stare at the audience. To the left, a woman picks up a body mould, fixing it around her waist, holding her 'face' between her teeth. And so begins the fascinating and atmospheric <i>Eshet</i>, based on the Old Testament story of Tamar, a young woman forced by convention to marry one of her dead husband's brothers. <br> Performed by Renana Raz and Yuval Fingerman, <i>Eshet</i> is a physically evocative tale which focuses on a contemporary reading of Tamar's emotions. The romance between Tamar and Er is expressed in a truly beautiful physical movement piece as their initial awkward reserve around each other grows into marriage and blissful happiness. However, their happiness is short-lived when Er is killed by God, leaving his wife childless. <br> Despite her grief and heartbreak and against her wishes, Tamar is then forced to marry Er's brother Onan. This makes uncomfortable viewing as he pursues her, lusting over her whilst she tries to avoid his roaming hands. Onan is then killed by God for spilling 'his seed to the ground' and Tamar is widowed and childless once again. The smallest of the puppets is Shelah - still a child, he is Er's youngest brother and Tamar's final option if she is to have children. Demonstrating her desperation to change her hopeless future, she disguises herself as a prostitute and seduces Er's father. <br> Etgar Theatre use this difficult and at times relentlessly harsh tale to focus on the plight of women in a male-dominated society. Fingerman operates all of the male puppets, with concentrated skill and constantly evolving physicality. There is no attempt to disguise the fact that they are both performers and puppeteers, their faces filled with emotion as they move with the freedom allowed by the detached heads. But whilst the performers succeed in creating and revealing intimate relationships, the story - in a largely silent performance with small amounts of speech in Biblical Hebrew - is simply pulled along by subtitles projected onto the back wall. In contrast the haunting soundtrack is used more subtly with an appropriately harrowing female vocal, making the tender moments of the piece all the more poignant and intensely sad. <br> <strong>Marie Kenny</strong> <br> <br> <p><strong>BlackSkyWhite<br> <i>USSR Was Here</i><br> ICA Theatre | London International Mime Festival<br> 16 January 2009<br></strong> <br> <img src="../images/reviewsjan/blackskywhite_USSRwashere.jpg" title='BlackSkyWhite, USSR Was Here' alt='BlackSkyWhite, USSR Was Here' align="right" /> Immediately after watching BlackSkyWhite's <i>USSR Was Here</i> at London's ICA building, my companion and I commandeer what we haven't even noticed are parts of a sculptural exhibit in order to try and figure out how many performers we had just been watching. The programme notes confirm it; there were only two. He would have been happy to accept up to five or six; to me, fewer than three seems impossible; and the discussion about how they could have done what we saw with only two continues long after ICA staff have redirected us to a more suitable place to sit. <br> This attests to both the greatest strength of the work and a potential flaw. Within seconds of beginning, the company have uncoupled us from the hyperbanality of central London traffic, establishing an Artaud-inspired dreamstate in which it is difficult to hold on to a sense of time or any other reference for coherence; it is not like watching someone else's nightmare so much as like <i>having</i> someone else's nightmare. With a searing soundscape which oscillates between painful and playful, and a grotesque gestural language which is simply but intelligently costumed, the work plays out in a razor-edged half-light with such an extraordinary level of technique that it is in danger of throwing the audience squarely back into the reality of being a theatre audience while they figure out how it's being done. <br> Ultimately, though, this destabilisation of coherence makes for a riveting hour (I'd have been happy if the clock said twenty minutes had passed; he thinks more than forty seems impossible), and one well-placed to mark the loss of that monolithic cold-war identity against which 250 million individuals shaped their own stories. Without that sense-shape of narrative or character there remains only the actions of the fragmentary figures on the stage (and a sideways glance at the history of mime through an invisible window); <i>USSR Was Here</i> is not a statement of presence but of absence; where performers alienated from the meaning of a super-narrative signal darkly across the auditorium at the fragility of the stories which give shape to our own actions.<br><strong> Eve Wedderburn </strong> <br> <br> <h1><strong> Total Theatre Reviews October - December 2009 </strong></h1> <p> <strong>Blind Summit Theatre <br /> <em>1984 <br /> </em>Battersea Arts Centre, London <br /> December 2009 <img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Blind%20Summit%201984.jpg" width="200" height="299" align="right" /><br /> </strong>A band of comrades arrive to tell us the sorry tale of the dastardly thought criminals Winston and Julia. They don't have many material resources, we learn, so must rely on a few simple props and their own humble storytelling skills. <br /> Thus begins Blind Summit's <em>1984</em> - as a play-within-the-play that is almost a parody of 'poor theatre'. All the tricks of the physical theatre trade are here, used (often tongue-in-cheek) with tremendous panache by the ensemble of seven: Grotowski meets Brecht with a hearty dash of Lecoquian hero/chorus. The scenography relies on the age-old endless possibilities of screens and chairs, and cardboard features heavily. <br /> And, as you'd expect of Blind Summit, there are some marvellous puppets (a Eurasian soft-cloth baby killed by cardboard bombs pierces the heart; and the Room 101 denouement, enacted with empty wire cages and puppet rats, manages to instil terror magnificently), yet also clever deployment of the broader principles of puppetry, as for example in a witty exposition of Goldstein's <em>The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism</em>, done with signs and 2D paper cuts emerging from behind a sheet (and for Blind Summit fans, there is fun to be had here spotting references to other shows: a little row of blue men, a flying spaceman...). <br /> But one question niggles: who is this for? Is there anyone out there who hasn't read Orwell's dystopian classic? If so, roll up -&nbsp;you are the target audience. For those of us (over)familiar with the book, the dogged sticking to the text (cut, of course, but still far too wordy) is trying. I was also irritated by the failure of the dramaturgy in leaving the comrade's play unclosed, without an 'end bracket': we are left with Winston and his melancholy loneliness. <br /> Despite these qualms, there is no denying the vim and vigour of Blind Summit's <em>1984</em> - and if you want to see a text-book example of good ensemble physical theatre, you'd be hard pushed to find anything better. <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior <br /> <br /> <br /> </strong> <strong>Vayu Naidu Company <br /> <em>Mischievous Maidens Across Mobile Geographies <br /> </em>Rich Mix, London <br /> November 2009 </strong><br /> What makes a good story? Wearing an elegant, magician-style orange cape with curved stripes in delicate fabrics, Vayu Naidu asks the audience. Smells, characters, a journey are the replies... <br /> She takes us first to the Himalayas, where the god Shiva meditates. But he's soon struck by Cupid's arrow and marries Parvati, who creates a chubby little boy that must be restored with an elephant's head after a bloody battle. This is just one of four stories, including the tale-within-a-tale of Scheherazade, who eludes death over 1,001 nights. 'Man makes and woman takes' is an African-American tale, and the final piece about Osiris and Isis is set on the banks of the Nile. <br /> Vayu Naidu is a highly skilled storyteller, who holds the audience's attention with clear, eloquent words and gestures. Such a solo show is no mean feat. It was generally well sustained, but did sometimes lose pace. The themes, such as the battle of the sexes and women as storytellers, could be both simplistic and engaging. There were some funny contemporary twists (the goddess Parvati overwhelmed with emails). <br /> Unfortunately, the audience was painfully small. Schoolchildren would have loved this style of storytelling, and it would also be interesting to see Vayu Naidu's collaborations with musicians and dancers. Overall, the tales were beguiling, a chance to return to child-like enchantment, through transformation after transformation. Only occasionally could the effect be almost too childish, perhaps needing a little tweaking or tightening for adults. <br /> <strong>Charlotte Smith <br /> <br /> <br /> Various Artists <br /> <em>Present : Tense / Thirteen <br /> </em>Southwark Playhouse, London <br /> November 2009 </strong><br /> 'DNA of innocent still to be retained for six years' headlined this instalment of Nabokov's flagship happening that responds to a striking newspaper story of the week. Under the bare-bricked arches of Southwark Playhouse, the companies took a running jump and somersaulted into their subject for a one-off performance. <br /> In Sarah Solemani's <em>Bifurcated</em>, suited bureaucrats reeled off bank statements, phone bills and CCTV logs, plotting the data trail of a bemused man in baggy jeans. Though the endings didn't quite tie up, the bleakly comic repetition communicated that knowing 'everything' about someone can mean knowing nothing at all. From insipid data to its utterly human implications, Kenneth Emmerson's versatile writing zoomed smoothly in and out of a crowd scene in Box of Tricks Theatre Company's ensemble. As a child went missing, monologues from her impassioned mother and an innocent bystander violated by a DNA swab voiced opposing views with equal passion, sandwiched with the cast's mantra, 'I am 99% you, you are 99% me'. <br /> The brilliantly conceived finale was an interactive social segmentation experiment from DryWrite. Half the audience were directed on stage by assistants armed with neon water pistols and unnerving smiles. Participants moved to the 'agree' or 'disagree' side of the stage in response to statements like 'Evil is something you learn, not something you are born with' and met with a squirting if they lingered too long. The results ridiculed the concept of profiling for assumed future guilt - 'potentially dangerous' audience members were labeled for our safety. The 'game' format brought unease at the discord of watching others make grave moral decisions at increasing speed. The trick of translating our ethics into a stroll to the left or right demonstrated that no matter how flippantly made, the decisions we act out are constantly recorded and define us, in the eyes of our peers and unseen audiences. <br /> <strong>Louise Ridley <br /> <br /> <br /> Michael Pinchbeck <br /> <em>The Post Show Party Show <br /> </em>The Green Room, Manchester <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Michael%20Pinchbeck%20post%20show.jpg" width="200" height="147" align="right" /><br /> The title of this performance hints at the self-reflective complexities about to take place. The audience being offered a drink by the performers on their way into the auditorium confirmed it, and Michael Pinchbeck's acknowledgment of actors and audience made it a certainty. This is a show about a show of a show. <br /> The concept is to reenact moments from the post-show party of an amateur operatic and dramatic society production of <em>The Sound of Music</em> from 1970 in which Pinchbeck's parents first met. Pinchbeck is joined in the performance by his parents creating a complex mix of the here and now, the then and there and times before, in between and after. <br /> Pinchbeck plays with the notions of time and place and amateur and professional in an energetic performance in which father and son act out conceptual representations of the sixteen songs from <em>The Sound of Music</em>. These representations consist of both performers moving small wooden stools around the stage from one demarcated square to another, often in symmetry and in time with the song which plays in the background. Past and present frequently overlap. During the reenactment of 'Do-Re-Mi', the lyrics are swapped for the thoughts of Pinchbeck senior as he wonders whether to offer a lift home to his future wife Vivienne. <br /> This is a complex production with many performances taking place in the same show, but complex becomes confusing as time, place, character, song and stool blur into one. For all Pinchbeck junior's ingenuity, matched by his father's energetic exuberance, the conceptualisations appear at times unhinged from any central thesis. Ultimately, perhaps this show speaks of itself too often, in too many languages to be fully understood. <br /> <strong>Dean Biddell <br /> <br /> <br /> Told By An Idiot <br /> <em>Fahrenheit Twins <br /> </em>Barbican Pit, London | bite <br /> November 2009</strong><br /> Onstage, a Winter Wonderland playground: a giant slide on a revolving turntable with a number of built-in hatches and hidden 'cupboards', the whole caboodle covered in white fake fur. Enter a Yupik Eskimo Ma and Pa who produce a baby, then another - the eponymous Fahrenheit Twins. The story of their childhood draws us into a weird and wonderful world of howling huskies, blinded foxes, and crashed helicopters. In many ways, this is a typical twins' tale of shared obsessions and secret pacts (to never grow up; to stave off the arrival of 'teets and beards'). There again, it's an archetypal exploration of the animus/anima desire for completion of the self, and a coming-of-age tale - with more than a touch of Hansel and Gretel, and a great swathe of The Snow Queen too. <br /> As is often the way in fairy tales, domestic objects take on a totemic value (knives, apples, a compass, a cuckoo clock), and the fantastical tasks that fall upon the protagonists mix and mingle merrily with the mundane rituals of childhood (from encounters with talking animals to bathtime with bubbles). We accept with complete suspension of disbelief that our hero and heroine must take the body of their dead mother on a sledge across the snowy lands, and that their father has 'forgotten' to give them food for the journey. <br /> The fancy set (by Naomi Wilkinson) provides a lot of physical fun and games, but ultimately <em>Fahrenheit Twins</em> is driven by the compelling theatre-clown skills of the two performers, company co-artistic directors Hayley Carmichael and Paul Hunter. They switch effortlessly from parents to children to dogs to foxes with the flick of a hood, a twitch of a head, or the donning of a mask. The transition moments are managed perfectly; the characterisation exact. A job done well; a pleasure to behold! <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior <br /> <br /> <br /> TEAM and National Theatre of Scotland <br /> <em>Architecting<br /> </em>Barbican Pit, London | bite <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/TEAM%20Architecting.jpg" width="200" height="166" align="right" /><br /> A problem arises with plays based on books or films when you aren't too familiar with the book or film. You spend a lot of time puzzling over references which don't make sense to you, wishing that you had done more research beforehand. <br /> <em>Architecting</em> is based on <em>Gone with the Wind, </em>but also has several simultaneous subplots. A politically correct remake of the film is used to compare the devastation of the American Civil war with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. There's the story of a grieving architect desperate to create her father's vision of building a development after Katrina's destruction. And then there's the story of a petrol station attendant who decides go on a road trip with a young woman who has her heart set on winning a Scarlett O'Hara beauty contest - he then becomes a contender himself. &nbsp; <br /> <em>Architecting</em> was devised by the TEAM , and at times I felt like they'd tried to cram too much in: all the loaded metaphors were too much to keep up with. The play opens in a bar, where we are told to make ourselves feel at home; it starts light and funny and switches to serious and sombre and back again - another constantly changing aspect to try to assimilate. <br /> The company are an extremely tight ensemble though, and the piece flows well, despite its complexities. Ultimately, all the subplots and characterisations come together to show that after disaster communities and individuals have an amazing ability to rebuild and regenerate. We find the strength to keep going.&nbsp; <br /> <strong>Marie Kenny</strong><br /> <br /> <br /> <strong>Forkbeard Fantasy <br /> <em>The Colour of Nonsense <br /> </em>Sallis Benney Theatre, Brighton <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Forkbeard%20Colour%20of%20Nonsense.jpg" width="200" height="187" align="right" /><br /> Forkbeard Fantasy are renowned for their wonderfully witty visual theatre productions - and thus it is in <em>The Colour of Nonsense</em>, in which cleverly crafted sets, potty props, kooky characters and madcap animation combine to create a surreal onstage world that is rather as if Tony Hart's <em>Vision On</em> had been reworked by an acid-addled pop art aficionado. <br /> Previous Forkbeard productions have taken us into the worlds of Shakespearean silent movies, Frankenstein's monstrous experiments, and the discovery of dinosaurs' bones (to name but a few topics). In <em>The Colour of Nonsense</em>, we are a little closer to home, with the artists playing - well, artists! <br /> In clownish parody of their own good selves, Tim Britton is a crackpot animator who feels compelled to render his life in cartoon form almost minute-by-minute - until past, present and future merge and his visions take on a life of their own, in a hilarious retelling of Edward Lear's 'Dong with a Luminous Nose'; Forkbeard's technical whizz-kid Ed Jobling tinkers with intriguing bits of kit, dragging a bleeping and flashing workstation round the stage; and Chris Britton makes mad dashes on and offstage in ever more ludicrous garb, portraying a veritable portfolio of whacky characters. Joining the human team are Cedric the office fly (who exists as a terrible buzzing sound, performed beautifully by Ed) and an animatronic parrot called Dolly (one of Penny Saunders' famous Forkbeard puppet-animal creations). <br /> So (almost) all present and correct for another marvellous Forkbeard show. The only missing element is a truly great story. The Emperor's-New-Clothes-inspired storyline of the creation of an invisible artwork should have been the starting point of the onstage action, but instead we have a cautious build to this revelation, and it is something of an anticlimax. <br /> But nothing can take away the joys and pleasures of how the piece looks and sounds and feels... Even when they are not at their very best, Forkbeard are still ahead of the rest of the visual theatre pack. <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior</strong><br /> <br /> <br /> <strong>Inkfish<br /> <em>The Brain <br /> </em>Little Angel Theatre, London | Suspense Festival <br /> November 2009</strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/The%20Brain2_by%20Inkfish_photo%20by%20Richard%20Termine.jpg" width="200" height="300" align="right" /><br /> <em>The Brain</em> starts with the autopsy of Albert Einstein, whose brain was removed and cut up for medical research when he died in 1955. It opens up into a puppet performance about peace and physics. Scenes around Einstein's life are recreated using toy theatres, handheld puppets, animation, black-and-white footage, live projections, audio, and gentle comedy.<br /> The narrative is not just a biography in reverse chronological order. There's also a strong political theme about the destructive potential of the atom bomb, drawing on the Russell-Einstein Manifesto. The main Einstein puppet figure, a fragile old man with a shock of white hair, has a gentle, wistful presence. He is occasionally manhandled, not in having his brain removed, but in a collision with a sheet during a scene change. <br /> Most of the puppetry is intricate and impressive. The paper theatres opening from a suitcase, a small bird, a violin and the cartoon-style animation about the 'Relativity estate' and its fatal freephone number all work well. A bombing scene was less subtle, the talk of a 'weapon of mass destruction' could seem a bit heavy-handed, and clocks may be clich&eacute;d. But it is splitting hairs to mention a few hiccups with the onstage filming. <br /> Overall, this was a lovely, witty, original piece that uses puppetry with contemporary bite. It had a strong message about nuclear disarmament. But perhaps my favourite moment was when the great scientist's head revealed a small marionette. <br /> <strong>Charlotte Smith <br /> <br /> <br /> Full Beam Visual Theatre <br /> <em>My Baby Just Cares for Me <br /> </em>Jackson's Lane, London | Suspense Festival <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Full%20Beam%20My%20Baby%20Just%20Cares%20for%20me.jpg" width="200" height="160" align="right" /><br /> Watching our parents decline has to be one of the hardest realities of getting older. For anyone who has ever had to care for an elderly relative <em>My Baby Just Cares for Me </em>is a touching tribute to the sacrifices and the hard work involved. A daughter cares for her father, a man who prided himself on knowing the name of every musician in his album collection. We see his decline and the impact caring for him has on his daughter, Catherine. It is physically and emotionally draining. <br /> This is a multi-layered production, filled with emotional highs and lows. Adam Fuller presents the father as a series of puppets: as they become smaller and frailer, from human-sized at the beginning to small and handheld by the end, they are used to show the father's declining health. The soundtrack injects warmth and gentle humour, and energises the production. Film footage is used to show the dramatic change, giving visual evidence of the happy memories Catherine has of the younger, lively, dancing man her father used to be. <br /> The play focuses heavily on Catherine's frustrations; text messages appear on a screen, commitments she must break as looking after her father becomes her life. She never discusses her feelings with her father; most scenes she is silent, and her restlessness is physically expressed through her movement as she scales the scaffolding set, dangling at different angles, unable to find peace. At times this physical expression seems repetitive - I wanted her to say how she was feeling, but perhaps that's the point: it's not an easy subject to talk about. <br /> <strong>Marie Kenny <br /> <br /> <br /> Touched Theatre<br /> <em>Human Remains</em><br /> Pleasance Theatre | Suspense Festival <br /> November 2009</strong><br /> <em>Human Remains</em> explores the life of James Tunstall, a real life adventurer from the North West of England, whose story is told through the playful examination of objects from his life. Artefacts from his journey through Africa are skilfully animated as the two actors (Selina Papoutseli and Gilbert Taylor) coyly discover the true nature of the man and his impact on everyone and everything he touched. Broken crockery, rugs and bowties are contorted into new shapes and given a personality beyond their passive involvement in the story.<br /> The two performers have a compelling physical grace that allows the objects to take centre stage, while their own feelings are hidden with subtle eye contact, humour and awkward silences. The physical elements of puppetry and theatre are seamlessly merged while the sound design of James Foz Foster adds mystique and personality.<br /> This is the first production by Touched Theatre, who have been set up to explore the idea of object-led theatre. It is a unique play that is paced well and nicely performed, but it has taken on a very big story and at times the method struggles to match the romance of the adventurer's life. The hesitant relationship between the two characters also felt undeveloped at times, but was always touching and easy to watch.<br /> The play has a strong sense of an idea developing, and I think that there is almost certainly even more coherent and powerful work to come from this company. This was, however, a highly enjoyable lo-fi production that charmed the audience throughout.<br /> <strong>Paul Tarpey<br /> <br /> <br /> Green Ginger <br /> <em>Rust <br /> </em>Pleasance Theatre, London | Suspense Festival <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Green%20Ginger_rust.jpg" width="200" height="200" align="right" /><br /> Green Ginger's <em>Rust </em>is a humbling display of three puppeteers whose exquisite craft and mastery will make any who see the show marvel at the wizardry that brings it to life. It's a heavyweight cocktail of off-the-wall comedy, masterfully animated cartoon-style puppets (so full of life they leave you wondering whether it might be <em>you</em> that is the unanimated object), and a kaleidoscopic array of different storytelling animation platforms. These platforms range in scale and form, from a three man (all-singing, subtly dancing) chorus, to a beautifully intricate shadow animation of a fish paste factory, to a wonderfully engineered ocean scene, where a miniature model of a sea boat is seen to have a battle with a submarine, upon a barrage of violent, boat-smashing waves. <br /> Rich in aggressive, bawdy energy, akin to a Punch and Judy fight, Green Ginger's <em>Rust </em>revels in a chaotic anarchy that explodes from every inch of the show's creaking, leaking iron set. Crashing forth like a torrent wave, <em>Rust </em>delights its audience with a collection of sideways characters that all appear to have been bred from the backend of a backward seaside town. <br /> Fantastically deranged, <em>Rust</em> is brave and relentless in its endeavours. The characters and the manner in which they are brought to life is the true beauty of the show and consequently, but not regretfully, the story becomes secondary. Particular highlights come in the form of Lionel (the paranoid record store owner and Welsh stoner), the wonderful choice to build the central characters around a punk sub-culture, and as a result the grungy punk soundtrack that provides the show with further metal to feed the rust. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts <br /> <br /> <br /> Action Hero <br /> <em>A Western <br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> November 2009 </strong><br /> This very simple show was beautifully executed and incredibly exciting to be involved with. A comic two-hander, it places us, the audience, at its heart, and makes full use of our presence. Set within the casual location of the Chelsea Theatre bar, I find myself armed with Pringles and a beer, loving every minute of this maverick entertainment. <br /> The concept is clear. Two performers guide the audience through a series of scenes - making attempts, with the little they have, to create a cowboy film. With the help of the audience playing extras in every scene, the Action Heroes wonderfully deconstruct a series of easily recognisable Spaghetti Western trademarks. <br /> Cue Mr. Morricone, a showdown at noon, a pub full of whores, and a poker game gone wrong. Combine that with ketchup for blood, a cowboy hat, a toothpick, a bike for a horse, a lot of long pauses and a pretty lady and we're almost there. Action Hero then add the show's gunpowder - the audience. A crowd of hand-shaped pistols, 'Piaows' on the tips of tongues, and a bar full of stink-eyes at the ready. <br /> This really was a hoedown. A fantastically progressive, intelligent piece of work that captures a lot of dust, gun and gal with little more than a tray full of ketchup bottles. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts <br /> <br /> <br /> Stacy Makishi<br /> <em>STAY!<br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Stacy%20Makishi%20Stay.jpg" width="200" height="245" align="right" /><br /> One sharpened the knife. The other wet herself. One barked like a dog. The other stole the ukulele. Both ate from a dog food bowl. The other stole the food... <br /> <em>STAY!</em> is a brutal blur between human lovers, dog and owner, performer and understudy. Two performers appear to live in a black box studio and explore a sadomasochistic relationship of dominance, dependence and subversion. <br /> Rich with poetic word battles, the show whips its way through a series of fast, rhythmic exchanges of language, silence and visual violence. Pillows are slashed, mouths and words are drowned, smothered and bashed, and two minds suffer in a constant barrage of spits, quips and slams. <br /> The setting is simple and clinically clean, and each action and word pierces like a knife. The live dimension is crucial and clearly articulated. There are constant references to the audience and to the performers themselves as artists. At one point, one of the performers justifies her crap acting by the fact that she ' s an artist, not an actor - reminding us that if she is not acting then their play could be real and therefore the threat, the violence and the presented torture could also be real. As a result the action only had to go so far for it to be disturbing, and it did just that, teetering on the edge; always threatening the irreversibly perverse. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts <br /> <br /> <br /> Curious <br /> <em>the moment I saw you I knew I could love you <br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> November 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Curious%20the%20moment%20i%20saw%20you.jpg" width="200" height="56" align="right" /><br /> As we enter the darkness, there's a feeling of disorientation, a slight panic (fight or flight?). Torches point the way to the rubber-dinghy lifeboats, and we scramble in, four to a boat. The ensuing journey takes in confessional monologue, storytelling, film, stomach scans, ballroom dance, and walkie-talkie conversations - apparently from the moon... <br /> So how does this all tie together? Ah, the sea, the sea! We are - what, 70% water? - and the world's surface is 70% water. Supported by the Wellcome Trust, and created in collaboration with scientists at the Wingate Institute of Neurogastroenterology, this piece investigates 'gut reactions' and links our watery insides to the watery-ness of the world. Curious' key artists, Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, and four other performers, of various ages and both sexes, tell tales - through words, actions, sounds, images - of real-life Jonahs swallowed by whales, blinded and washed almost to oblivion; of Beachy Head suicides who miss the poetic moment but jump anyway; of champagne-doused social occasions marred by choking emotions; of poignant seaside trysts of older lovers; and of astronauts whose names nobody remembers, left alone gazing down at the moon's waterless seas, whilst compatriots walk on that strange rock that pulls tides and makes women bleed. <br /> There are a thousand beautiful moments: my favourites include a film of a woman floating adrift at sea, projected onto a tiny Sealegs tablets packet; the filmed, then live, dance of an older Adam-and-Eve; and a harrowing story of a childhood terrorised by a sword-swallower's accident. It's a rich and rewarding experience being immersed in this watery world; yet there are reservations. Some of the intimate moments feel a little awkward, slightly mistimed. And there are rather two many ideas competing. Perhaps it all just needs a little more chewing and digesting... <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior <br /> <br /> <br /> Paul Granjon <br /> <em>Black Box Ni <br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> November 2009 </strong><br /> A man in an inflatable sumo suit, wearing a yellow vest and shorts and an oversized sun-visor (adorned with radio-controlled flower), gives a lecture on military robots. Later, the same man dances a duet with a robot called Mofo as he sings along with the homespun techno track 'Born to be alive'. <br /> Such surrealist technotopia is what lies at the epicentre of Paul Granjon's work, a hub around which vague political messages (the lecture on military robotics, a determination to make a happy techno track) circulate through a sea of shambolic charm. <br /> Failure has been the focus for a certain domain of performance work for a while now. Artistic risk has shifted its focus away from the possibility of not succeeding, and instead moved towards the audience's reaction towards failure. Thankfully, <em>Black Box Ni</em> is sufficiently captivating throughout the majority of its presentation for Granjon's risk-taking to pay off. <br /> Some of the songs have been performed better in the past than that which was seen at the Chelsea, but these ebbs in engagement were more than compensated for by other moments. Audience investment in the show reaches a peak whilst we wait - hearts firmly entrenched in mouths - as Granjon walks closer and closer to a heat-detecting sentry robot armed with a powerful paintball gun - only for the tension to be turned on its head with Granjon's realisation that the sentry is in fact harmless because he has forgotten to connect the electronic trigger mechanism up to the gun. Moments such as this enhance the key sections of the performance dramatically; it is through their unpredictability and awkwardness that the robots develop a personality, transforming them from binary participants into active collaborators. <br /> <strong>Tim Jeeves <br /> <br /> <br /> Thomas Desi <br /> <em>Operation Orlac <br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> October 2009 </strong><br /> Hands have a firm grip on Operation Orlac. They form slender shadows on a hospital bed as a pianist is treated after an accident, twisted projections like gnarled branches and a reddish-brown pointed finger...<br /> For these are also 'schreckliche H&auml;nde' and 'M&ouml;rderh&auml;nde' - terrible, murderous hands in a horror story based on the 1924 film by Robert Wiene, who also directed <em>The Cabinet of Dr Caligari</em>. The operatic remake by Thomas Desi and Zoon Music Theater of Vienna manages to create live freeze-frames that seem perfectly in keeping with the world of silent horror films. But the sound is also original. There's not just piano music, but human voices too are stretched and shaped like new instruments, with songs by two mezzo-sopranos that mix warbling, overexaggerated consonants with almost silent mouthing. <br /> The piece is both unusual and within the Grand Guignol tradition. For example, the exaggerated darkness and light of horror films is recreated by an onstage technician, shining lights in contemporary fashion. All corners of the theatre are used, with the audience in the middle in zig-zag seating and encouraged to move around. This helps bring out contrasting moods, from Ophelia-like fragility to murderous manipulation.<br /> Perhaps the visual effects and tableaux are ultimately more gripping than the plot or characters. Despite lashings of horror, the suspense is limited, and it is the sound and visual imagery that linger more. It's nonetheless a privilege to see such lavish entertainment and lurid escapism recreated so meticulously.<br /> <strong>Charlotte Smith <br /> <br /> <br /> Gob Squad <br /> <em>Live Long and Prosper<br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Gob%20Squad%20Live%20Long%20and%20Prosper.jpg" width="200" height="130" align="right" /><br /> Spock dies on the Starship Enterprise, but also outside a German poundstore called<em> Pfenningland</em> ; a Red Indian dies on a Wild West mountaintop, as well as in a Berlin shopping mall; Hilary Swank ' s euthanasia scene from <em>Million Dollar Baby </em>finds its new home in a launderette. <br /> Gob Squad take seven famous death scenes from cinema and present them alongside their own remakes - versions that were filmed in social spaces, in front of unsuspecting public audiences across Berlin. <br /> The installation in <em>Live Long and Prosper </em>is made up of two films, played simultaneously and projected onto two different screens. The stark difference between the original scenes and the Gob Squad remakes is that the originals remove all sense of the film ' s surrounding film-set, exclusively framing the fiction of the film ' s narrative. Gob Squad's versions, on the other hand, are made to reveal the social landscapes that they are set in. As a consequence the external setting and the public audience become fundamental dimensions to the interpretation and perception of the remakes. The filmed public events that Gob Squad engineered become clearly defined as happenings performed for an audience, rather than real characters living their lives in a fictional film narrative. <br /> Suddenly it is possible to understand that the central figure in this installation piece is the audience, and their relationship to fictional deaths on film. In this way, Gob Squad use the live event beautifully, setting up an extraordinary exploration of film death and its witnesses. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts<br /> <br /> <br /> Helena Hunter <br /> <em>dis-locate <br /> </em>Chelsea Theatre, London | Sacred Festival <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Helena%20Hunter%20dislocate.jpg" width="200" height="267" align="right" /><br /> The theatre is almost in complete darkness as we enter. It isn't until your eyes adjust that you can see part of a woman's back - a small section is lit. Helena Hunter kneels, perfectly still as the audience file in. Four objects that look like rain drops the size of your head are hanging from the ceiling around her; they catch the light and they gleam. <br /> When she rises, we see she is blindfolded. She moves around the space, she discovers the hanging items with her shoulders, her back and moves around each one in turn, making them swing. Still blindfolded, knife in hand, she lunges at each of them; they burst, their liquid contents spilling to the floor as she searches for the next. <br /> She produces a blueish malleable ball. The knife is back. She stabs the ball. A paint-like substance covers the floor; she lies down in the paint and she turns and turns her entire body. She is joined by four more female performers; they each claim a corner of the stage. One by one they perform a range of experiments, test tubes in hand; substances are mixed to create a reaction, a change in their form. Meanwhile, Hunter is still turning. <br /> Hunter shows us the state of change: once something is transformed, the action can't be taken back. She explores the 'in-between' state, as it is in it's own right; the journey can be long but the impact can be instantaneous. <br /> <strong>Marie Kenny <br /> <br /> <br /> James Thi&eacute;rr&eacute;e <br /> <em>Raoul <br /> </em>Barbican Theatre, London | bite <br /> October 2009 </strong><br /> Ah, the doppelganger, the shadow-self, the internalised twin - so many artists have found rich pickings in this topic, and James Thi&eacute;rr&eacute;e freely plunders the mythologies in this, his first full-length solo show. Or at least, almost solo: there is clever use of body doubles cum visible stagehands in the enacting of his tale of a solitary man, Raoul, who seemingly comes home from his wanderings to find himself already there. <br /> The references and allusions (not to mention illusions) are copious: the mesmerising gaze of Narcissus played out in a dance with a large mirror; a full-blooded wrestling match with the self that evokes Ted Hughes' narrative poem, 'Gaudete' - an exploration of a madness induced by solitude in which the lonely soul is convinced that there's more than one of him out there (Duncan Jones' film <em>Moon</em> is another recent example of that theme explored). <br /> So if it is not an original line of artistic investigation, what makes Thi&eacute;rr&eacute;e's Raoul special? Him, for a start - he's one of the most talented and charismatic performers you are likely to see, and this quasi-solo outing gives him a chance to explore his extraordinary repertoire of dance/circus/mime skills: tumbling, flying, balancing, staff spinning, moonwalking and more. Then there's the scenography of Victoria Chaplin Thi&eacute;rr&eacute;e: billowing curtains that morph from sails to clouds; desert island homes that collapse and reassemble like a giant pick-up-sticks game; a whole menagerie of puppet creatures (a ghostly elephant, skeletal birds, a giant metal fish). And the soundscape: the white noise of the radio, a lovely 'human Theremin' sequence, the playful use of popular songs from bygone days ('Just whistle a happy tune'). <br /> It is all wonderful stuff, despite moments of overindulgence (a corporeal-mime-style morph into a horse is one), and the pace is a little slack in the first half. As with so many solo shows, there is a need for an outside eye to ask 'why' and to curb some of the excesses. But James Thi&eacute;rr&eacute;e's not-quite-there is still miles ahead of most people's 100%... <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior <br /> <br /> <br /> Spymonkey <br /> <em>Moby Dick <br /> </em>The Corn Exchange, Brighton | Paramount Comedy Festival <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Spymonkey%20Moby%20Dick.jpg" width="200" height="299" align="right" /><br /> Why <em>Moby Dick</em>? That is the question that our intrepid company of clowns put to the audience. Because it's there, perhaps - a great big blubbery lump of literature ripe for boning and chewing over in what the company describe aptly as 'a glorious mis-telling of the Herman Melville novel'. <br /> Pantomime and physical comedy have long used the tricks of the theatrical trade that are viewed, mistakenly, as 'postmodern': employing a knowing narrator; stepping in and out of the action; referencing the artifice of the onstage situation; subverting Aristotle's unities of action, place, and time; plundering the supermarket of theatrical style to drag up whatever goodies are needed in the telling of the tale. Goodies which in this case include a bunch of hearty sea shanties; some extraordinary LED-lit furry-fishy whole-body costumes; a ludicrously long-armed puppet God; a terrible teeny puppet Pip (Spymonkey are obviously aching to be awarded some sort of puppetry equivalent of the Bad Sex trophy); and some marvellous mock-the-mime rope pulling and waving from the boat to the shore (Lecoq, eat your heart out). <br /> The company are here directed by Complicite founder-member Jos Houben, and it's a partnership that proves fruitful. All the Spymonkey trademarks are here, yet each of the four performer-creators seems to shine more brightly under the new direction: Petra Massey is as beautifully bawdy as ever, playing up on her clown persona's peevishness at being forced to take part in a show with no women characters (and thus inventing them - enter Mermaid, stage right); narrator Aitor Basauri plays magnificently with 'foreign-ness' and the tripwires of the English language ('confusing 'whales' with 'Wales', for a start); Stephan Kreiss makes a marvellous cannibal, and continues his mission of extreme slapstick with an extraordinary slippery-deck sequence; and Toby Park could have been born to play an am-dram actor playing Captain Ahab. All four double (and more) as the crew of sailors, merrily swigging rum and swabbing the decks in between bouts of singing and disco-dancing (to YMCA!). <br /> All-in-all, a corker of a show, the best Spymonkey yet: heave ho my hearties - you've broken the back of the beast! <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior <br /> <br /> <br /> Live Theatre Newcastle &amp; The Empty Space <br /> <em>Motherland <br /> </em>Tristan Bates Theatre, London <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/motherland.jpg" width="200" height="133" align="right" /><br /> At a time when the role of British troops is under massive scrutiny, <em>Motherland</em> seems terrifyingly relevant. The ensemble of four actors play sixteen women between them, women whose lives have been changed irrevocably by their loved ones' decisions to go to war. <br /> Writer and director Steve Gilroy interviewed twenty women in the North East in 2007; women who had experienced loved ones going away to Iraq and Afghanistan, some of them never coming back. The women address the audience, as they would have addressed their interviewers. They do a magnificent job of presenting ordinary women whose stories are compelling and deeply personal. <br /> Munitions boxes are scattered around the floor, containing memories, and a projector tells us the women's names. Transitions between characters are done purely through the actors' skilful physical characterisations. Some of these stories stand alone; they are strong as single snapshots. Others come together as their tales are intertwined, showing different perspectives of the same story. A broad spectrum of relationships are portrayed; mothers, sisters, lovers recall precious memories, first dates, childhood stories, personality traits. Some of them blame themselves for their loss. One mother recalls how she had advised her son against a career in football, saying it would be short-lived. Ironically, her son was killed after eighteen months service. <br /> The women are constantly asking questions and trying to find a reason, an explanation which might ease their despair. <em>Motherland</em> uses humour and grace to deal with a personal and political subject. The raw pain and anger of thousands is made real in this performance. <br /> <strong>Marie Kenny <br /> <br /> <br /> Shunt <br /> <em>Money <br /> </em>Bermondsey Street, London <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Shunt%20money1.jpg" width="200" height="226" align="right" /><br /> Loosely based on <em>L</em><em> '</em><em> Argent</em> , a novel written by Emile Zola about the collapse of a 19 th Century bank, Shunt's <em>Money</em> takes the audience physically inside a crashing money machine - a giant metal structure coated in a rusting iron armour. <br /> Once inside, the audience are bustled around a three-storey structure full of theatrical tricks and surprises. Characters burst from hatches and doors, and appear at windows that previously seemed to be solid wooden floors. Backdrops of doorways change from iron to brick; rooms keep appearing and disappearing. Nothing is as solid as it seems in this world of lavish extravagance. <br /> The effect is dizzying. There is an empty charm to the whole affair that makes everything feel very fragile. The interior design, and the character ' s text and actions, all feels very contrived. <br /> It would be easy to write <em>Money</em> off as a work that overindulges in shallow trickery and empty spectacle, but this would be missing the point of the show, I think. The audience are placed in a magic castle that boasts glory, but doesn ' t pay out what it promises. The looming, leaking reality of the buildings inevitable crash keeps appearing left, right and centre, but the shallow visuals keep me distracted; and it has to be said, it worked on me. I was charmed, wined and played by this show. <br /> Shunt's <em>Money </em>is filthy rich in layers of meaning and experience - a powerhouse of trickery on more than one level. The barrage of exquisite, lavish spectacles provides a tremendous metaphor for the greed and vulnerability of human minds - so susceptible to cheap tricks. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts <br /> <br /> <br /> A Lowry Production <br /> <em>Fireflies <br /> </em>Lowry Theatre, Manchester <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Lowry%20Fireflies.jpg" width="200" height="172" align="right" /><br /> <em>Fireflies</em> was presented as part of The Lowry's commitment to innovative theatre set within a local context. A love story set in an estate in Salford that merges a simple theatre setting with a large greyscale video background, the play features many characters, all named after nearby towns, all performed by Naomi Radcliffe and Paul Simpson. <br /> The two central characters are Leigh and Nelson, single parents whose attempt to avoid drowning under the stresses of everyday living eventually leads to love. Their stories unravel alongside each other but only briefly touch, the play closing with video evidence of a happy ending. <br /> Much of what passes as day-to-day life is relentlessly bleak, and searching for heart within this desolate world requires subtlety and skilful characterisation. The play, unfortunately, lacks both and as a result fails to have the emotional impact that the energy of the performers and the evocative video work deserves. <br /> <em>Fireflies</em> is dominated by the social environment it recreates, and the starkly beauiful way in which this element of Salford's soul is captured on film sharply contrasts with the bland and overly obvious way it is portayed theatrically. It works as a slick multimedia exercise, but the characters are all thinly drawn and the humour mainly clumsy and dated. <br /> It does move along at a relentless pace, and Naomi Radcliffe in particular has a tireless charisma that at times brought a profound nature to <em>Fireflies</em>. The play had a series of subplots that acted more as sketches within the play, casually thrown in to use as theatrical devices or gratuitous cultural and social reference points. As a result its energy generally felt wasted. An interesting idea, but its failure to deliver anger, sadness or empathy in dealing with challenging issues leaves you feeling that these problems are being exploited rather than explored. <br /> <strong>Paul Tarpey <br /> <br /> <br /> Ding Foundation <br /> <em>Hanging by a Thread <br /> </em>People Show Studios, London <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Ding%20Foundation%20Hanging%20By%20a%20Thread.jpg" width="200" height="134" align="right" /><br /> Ding Foundation's latest work serves up an animated patchwork of fictional realities in which objects and puppets of mismatched scale and aesthetic - from a human-sized female puppet fashioned from a tailor's dummy to a shoe-sized male puppet figure to a tiny toy horse - work together on a journey of multiple, misshapen narratives. <br /> Hanging by a Thread centres upon the world of a bedridden woman, a figure seemingly woven into a woollen blanket, who emerges from the form of the bed itself - a bed which becomes a canvas for a series of episodic animations. The elderly lady is seen to violently sculpt, from the physical material of bed and bedcovers, a world built from dream, hallucination and life's memories - weaving these together to create an evolving landscape (a new born mountain, a torrent river, a house on a hilltop, a solitary tree). <br /> Distortion and disproportion allow for layers of co-existing potential realities to be present simultaneously, inviting us to construct multiple, autonomous narratives that spiral around life, death and the business of dying. The work finds strength in its allusions to life against a backdrop of a presumed imminent death. It is full of surprises and enchanting ambiguity, but this uncertainty does not come without its challenges. The show includes many confusing passages that pursue a narrative relating to a younger woman, a carer or perhaps a granddaughter (the tailor's dummy figure). The lack of clarity is disconcerting, as these scenes take up a lot of time whilst adding little. <br /> Despite these reservations, <em>Hanging by a Thread</em> still seduced my imagination. It was possible to look beyond the arduous, half-told story and lay focus firmly upon the striking theatrical tapestry contained within the life, death and resurrection of the bedcover world. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts <br /> <br /> <br /> Coney <br /> <em>A Small Town Anywhere <br /> </em>Battersea Arts Centre | Not For Me, Not For You, But For Us <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Coney%20Small%20Town%20Photo%20-%20Gavin%20Millar.jpg" width="200" height="150" align="right" /><br /> Everyone hates me. I have been Le Mayor for maybe twenty minutes now and everyone is vying to get me out of town. I am plagued with confusion. A young lady spots this. She turns to me and says, ' You ' re rubbish. ' Rubbish at what, I wonder. Playing? Maybe she is in character, I think to myself. Or maybe I <em>am</em> rubbish. I don ' t know. <br /> This is starting to read more like a letter to an agony aunt than a review, but in fact I am participating in <em>A</em><em>Small Town Anywhere - </em>a theatre piece at Battersea Arts Centre where the audience become the characters in a story about a small town. <br /> The main problem, however, is that no one seems to have a clue what they are doing. It ' s all a bit of a free-for-all. Then at some point it comes to me: it ' s okay. We can make and break the rules as we please. We are in the shit, as they say in clowning, and it ' s time to play. <br /> Luckily I make a friend and she and I decide to embark on a mission of anarchy together. Before long we are leading political rallies, stomping on hats and inciting general rebellion. We feel like we are pushing things forward. Maybe we are. <br /> It's great to play with the rules and test what's possible, and it seems that that is the very thing that Coney are doing. It's scruffy and teetering on the edge of failure, but I liked it. It felt a bit like the first time you do anything: it was good, but you knew it could be better. <br /> <strong>Alexander Roberts<br /> <br /> <br /> Geraldine Pilgrim <br /> <em>Handbag <br /> </em>Battersea Arts Centre, London | Not For Me, Not For You, But For Us <br /> October 2009 </strong><img src="../images/Reviews%20Dec/Geraldine%20Pilgrim%20Handbag%20credit%20Sheila%20Burnett.jpg" width="200" height="300" align="right" /><br /> Sometimes when you hear about a show, you know immediately how it'll be. Often it's a disappointment when it turns out to be just what you'd imagined. But sometimes it is completely satisfying, as is the case with Geraldine Pilgrim's <em>Handbag</em>. <br /> Here's the idea: in a big empty hall, a lone female in a red dress dances alone on the stage to Michael Jackson's 'Billy Jean' - dances as if she is in her bedroom rehearsing the night of clubbing ahead. Then, one by one, what looks to be a hundred women of all ages, shapes and sizes enter the space, each dressed to the nines in party dress and heels, each carrying a handbag. Each claims her bit of space and - yes - dances round her handbag. At the end of the piece, each woman leaves, one by one, as they arrived, from doors to each side of the vast space. The one wild card is a pack of men who enter and observe at one point. I'm not convinced they are necessary. <br /> It is such a lovely piece that I feel the need to come back again, so see it twice (it is presented at BAC as part of an evening of various shows and activities, and repeats a few times). Knowing exactly what will happen on second viewing, far from taking away from the experience, adds a lovely sense of expectation, and a tingling feeling of appreciation on witnessing the completion. Somehow, the repetition seems part of the piece: as if this group of people are locked into a blissful otherworld in an eternal cycle of partying that we have been allowed to glimpse fleetingly. <br /> <strong>Dorothy Max Prior <br /> </b> <br /> <br /> <br /> </strong></p> </td> <td width="10" valign="top">&nbsp;</td> </tr> </table> <!-- InstanceEndEditable --> <table width="800" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> <tr> <td><p align="center"><span class="tt_footertext"><a href="#top"><strong>^Page Top</strong></a> | <a href="/index.html">Home </a>| <a href="/news/index.html">News</a> | <a href="/magazine/index.html">Magazine</a> | <a href="/links/">Links</a> | <a href="/awards/index.html">Awards </a>| <a href="/Reviews/">Reviews</a> | <a href="/general/about.html">About</a> | <a href="/general/contact.html">Contact</a> | <a href="/join.html">Join TT</a></span><span class="style4"><br /> </span></p></td> </tr> </table> <p align="center" class="tt_footertext">website by<br /> <a href="mailto:gabzfp@hotmail.com">Gabz Digital Media</a> &amp; <a href="http://www.kindnesscreative.com">Kindness Creative </a></p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <script type="text/javascript"> var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? 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