Higher than the Sun, Whirlpool

Review in Issue 7-4 | Winter 1995

Groovy trapeze troupe Higher than the Sun expand their minds as well as their muscles in this concise and well-scripted boy-meets-girl story, set against a backdrop of today's club and E scene.

Remarkably similar in its treatment of its central love theme to BBC2's recent Lovebites production Loved-Up (transmitted two weeks later), Matt Costain and Gaynor Darbyshire's Luvdup lovers are engagingly and honestly portrayed against an urban panorama of fast moving film projection. With sections of movement and aerial acrobatics well integrated throughout, Whirlpool showed a determination to provide decent acting from within a sustained comprehensible human narrative of the hopelessness of lives spent trying to recreate past highs. As in life, the highs are handled better than the lows, but it is admirable that one of Britain's finest young aerial companies should have taken the risk of using the skills that have already established their reputation so sparingly, albeit intelligently and as tools for dramatic illustration. They have proved once again that physicality on stage is most effective when it is purposeful.

Artforms
Presenting Artists
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Sep 1995

This article in the magazine

Issue 7-4
p. 26