Author Archives: Geraldine Giddings

About Geraldine Giddings

Geraldine has been examining theatre and mixed-media performance from the auditorium since childhood, and began reviewing for Total Theatre after completing a mentorship to critique circus performance, in a scheme set up by the Circus Arts Forum. She has been company manager, and worked in production and development at Cirque Bijou, a circus production company, since 2006.

balletLORENT: Rapunzel

In the opening scenes of this show, the stage is full of children and adults happily dancing; brightly lit, laughing, they throw giant red balloons gently to one another and dance gaily around a central maypole, framed by the stylised wrought iron trellis / tree panels that make up the show’s set. It could be the opening to a family musical, but for the fact that the scene has built up from a darker beginning, in which two darkly lit female characters slowly and labouringly produced large egg-timers from underneath hoop-bottomed skirts.Rapunzel, like most popular folktales, sure has its dark side, but while the Brothers Grimm version sees the baby-stealing, tower-emprisoning wicked witch as the centre of the story’s darkness, balletLORENT tease out more complex and emotive themes and run them alongside the traditional Grimm line.

Director and choreographer Liv Lorent, shaping a text by Carol Ann Duffy, is deeply concerned with the theme of motherhood in Rapunzel – a tale in which the female characters figure far more heavily than the male. The childless ‘witch’ is a strong, individual character, but no wicked witch. Shaped by her solitude, she works forcefully but carefully in her beautiful garden. The childless (but expecting) woman who craves the witch’s rampion plant is far more feminine in style and movement. She also has a tendency to behave obsessively, hormonally, hysterically. Fast forward twelve years and it’s the ‘witch’ behaving hysterically when she claps Rapunzel into a doorless tower to stop her from growing up and leaving home. There’s an evocative scene in which the queen, whose son has disappeared after falling in love with Rapunzel-in-the-tower, performs a slow and ritualistic dance en pointe, counterpointed by Rapunzel’s natural mother on the other side of the stage. Both bereft mothers wear empty nests on their backs. These sophisticated moments unfortunately give an occasional air of bathos to the rest of the show, for this adult (female) audience member at least – and it’s possible that they would have passed a younger audience member by entirely.

A glance through the programme shows a highly impressive creative team who on paper are at the top of their games across the board. The dancers are generally long-term company members. This translates onto the stage as a stylised, deliberate, heavily crafted show, rich with imagery and symbolism, that’s a feast for the eyes and ears. The dance is interesting and expressive – and the dancers are good and play their parts well – but it feels as though the creation, the craft, the concept, were the company’s priority rather than the output, the dance. That is an observation rather than a criticism – and parts of the creation are excellent, including Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting, Phil Eddolls’s set and Murray Gold’s music. There’s also an interesting education programme alongside the show, which has allowed over 700 young people to take part in workshops – and a talented and well-directed young cast of local dancers fill certain scenes in a way that really adds to the show’s appeal for a young audience.

This is a show full of character and individuality that is bound to speak to different audience members in different ways. There’s certainly a disparity between the emphasis placed on the ‘mother’ theme versus other narrative elements, which can undermine the drama, but on the whole it’s an ambitious and good quality dance-theatre production that looks and sounds beautiful.

www.balletlorent.com

Bristol Old Vic and Handspring Puppet Company: A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is a dream-state, otherworldly imagining of A Midsummer Night’s Dream– funny, playful, but possessing the dark urgency of a particularly bizarre dream that embroils the sleeper and occupies their thoughts even upon waking. This is the much-hyped collaboration between Bristol Old Vic’s artistic director Tom Morris and South African Handspring Puppet Company, whose previous partnership War Horse needs no introduction. Strategically scheduled early in BOV’s second season after a major refurbishment, this is an ambitious project that aims to put the theatre firmly back on the national map of producing houses.

Bold, inventive and experimental, this is not a romantic fairytale of love and gentle confusion in a temperate, fragrant forest, but a hot, sweaty anxiety dream that jumps from one chaotic landscape to another. Characters morph into one another, and themes echo and multiply in a boundary-less imagined world full of eerie noises and illogical occurrences. It makes complete sense to treat A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this way, and yet it feels new, rare and a little dangerous. It is cynical, flippant and brusque.

A dizzying array of puppetry styles are at the core of the show’s abstraction, not least because conventions attached to each style are invariably broken. The lovers are selfish, immature, horny teenagers, full of a flouncy, shallow energy that supports their passionate pursuit of one another one minute, and an ardent switching of loyalties the next. Each actor has a beautiful little poseable puppet likeness of themselves – the story is told through the doll-like puppets but at particularly intense times the action breaks out and returns to the actors. Sometimes this is powerful, sometimes confusing. Oberon and Titania are giant floating, ghostly Grecian heads operated by a strong Hippolyta and a playful Theseus. Puck is a sinister whisper, a confluence of inanimate objects that imitate Epstein’s Rock Drill one minute, and a wagging Scottie dog or oozing snail the next. He is there and not-there – he takes centre stage, operated by three actors, with their three voices and six hands, but disappears in an instant, back into the chorus of floating planks that represent fairies, forest and confusion. Bottom – well… Titania and Bottom’s grotesque affair is a burlesque bacchanal that is difficult to shake from the memory, even if I’d rather forget about it. Hilarious, hysterical, rude and nightmarish, again the decisions made in the staging make complete sense in terms of the play and yet you rarely see it pushed this far.

A chaos of styles and ideas contribute to this telling of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a giant theatrical experiment. It’s fascinating, affecting and immersive. It is nothing like War Horse and will not charm a family audience looking for something to do in the Easter Holidays, but it will certainly give them lots to think about.

www.bristololdvic.org.uk / www.handspringpuppet.co.za

Play on Words, Icon Theatre, Loop Dance: The Little Lost Frog and the Christmas Wish

Young children are not the sort of audience who will give a performance the benefit of the doubt, especially two days after Christmas, when there are lots of new toys to play with at home. But as The Little Lost Frog’s audience of three to six year olds and accompanying adults collectively find their way through a dark tunnel to the second scene of this three-scene promenade performance, there is no doubt about it: everyone is mesmerised. Children hold hands to help each other find somewhere to sit, parents keep an eye out for each other’s toddlers, and adults and children alike peer around a wonderland of twinkling lights. An astonishing quiet falls on an audience that only moments before were excitedly joining in with ‘he’s behind you’-style slapstick comedy in the twee kitchen of Mrs Cupcake and her naughty cat Cookie.

This intimate, participatory show carefully manages its young audience’s mood and its older audience’s expectations, involving everyone in a quest to create a rainbow, restore the Fairy Godmother’s stolen magic, and ultimately return the Little Lost Frog to his home in time for Christmas. In Chatham, a town where the main Christmas entertainment is a successful commercial pantomime, I suspect that the introductory kitchen scene is more to set the parents at ease than the children. Though the jokes, songs, costumes and scenery here are neither surprising nor adventurous, the scene works, allowing everyone to find their bearings in the space and to feel safe with the size of the crowd and the characters involved.

The show starts to impress at the transition into the second scene, set in a forest clearing. A very likeable Little Lost Frog (Mark Conway) is in reality quite big and happily reassuring, gently encouraging children to join in with the dancing where appropriate, and explaining the show’s conventions when necessary. His rapport with a beautiful, glittering, ballet-dancing Christmas Wish (Nina Atkinson) strikes a perfect balance – she communicates through dance and gesture, explaining what we need to do next in our quest, and Frog encourages the audience to interpret what she is telling us. Sweet music and low lighting complement Chris Steven’s fantastic forest of wicker trees and keep the excitement gently bubbling. Children are invited to summon light for the rainbow, each collecting a little battery-powered fairylight to put into the Christmas Wish’s basket. Encouraged by well trained, subtle stewards, adults continue joining in if their children need help.

The third scene of the performance follows a similar convention. We all carefully move to another part of the theatre space to a ‘river bank’, where, impressively, not one child steps onto the blue plastic sheet down the middle of the space that represents the river – though a few of the older children enjoy hopping on the stepping stones. Tensions rise when a mildly threatening puppet Sprite appears, but with the help of the Christmas Wish we decide to be friends with him, and the expected success of our mission is punctuated by a heartwarming rainbow – an archway made of coloured Chinese lanterns. Children hop happily under the rainbow to collect a sticker and meet the Frog in the foyer, and the excited buzz there is thoughtful, engaged and responsive to the story that’s just been shared.

NIE and Tobacco Factory Theatre: Hansel and Gretel

In a cottage in a deep, dark, specifically Eastern European forest, a family suffer a bad, completely empty-cupboarded famine. It’s important that we understand that this famine is a serious problem, but also that the forest is very far away – and so we are worried for the family, but not too concerned that a similar famine might also affect us. That wouldn’t do.

NIE’s Hansel and Gretel is a warming, Christmassy production, with a dash of self-examination and self-conscious humour adding intellectual richness. Its ensemble is truly international – five artists from four different countries, variously draw in language, music, movement, and puppets to tell the story. A very wicked stepmother (‘not the modern sort of stepmother, who might pick you up from rugby on a Wednesday afternoon’) screeches only in Norwegian, browbeating a weak, henpecked coward of a father into taking Hansel and Gretel off into the forest and leaving them there to count elephants until he returns. They count 1167 before falling asleep.

Unai Lopez de Armentia and Stefanie Mueller play a very young, sweet, intelligent and funny Hansel and Gretel. They each manipulate a little puppet to represent the heroic siblings, so that one moment we are watching the actors watching the puppets, and the next the actors themselves are Hansel and Gretel. This double representation offers a little window into the rehearsal room – we see the company’s reactions to the characters and plight of Hansel and Gretel, just as we see how the actors then turn their observations into real characters. It works – strengthening our own reactions and drawing us closer to the characters.

Several times during the performance we are offered this window into the creation process or invited to join the company watching themselves performing. ‘And Hansel and Gretel continued counting elephants until they fell asleep. And all this time… I have been playing the ukulele,’ says musical director / ensemble / later the Wicked Witch Carly Davies. At another point, Gretel can’t stop crying, and the other ensemble members become increasingly worried when their firm ‘and then, Gretel stopped crying’ falls on deaf ears. NIE have worked hard to make this their own story. Though we know the way it’s going, there isn’t a twist or turn here that isn’t made new or validated by NIE’s examination of it.

Interestingly, we stick with Hansel and Gretel, their family situation and the journeys into the woods until well into the second half, and the gingerbread house/wicked witch element doesn’t dominate, as it could do. This works – it would be a pleasure watching Lopez and Mueller interact as Hansel and Gretel for far longer – and the witch is quite bizarre, a myopic Midlands eccentric who grabs the attention but, like the Norwegian stepmother, is best off in small doses. Alex Byrne’s direction allows this concoction just the right level of melodrama and hyperbole.

A pretty set of snow and trees, with a tiny candlelit gingerbread house, give the performance a nicely festive atmosphere, and rousing, Eastern European inspired music, directed by Carly Davies and played by the cast, stops it from ever becoming saccharine. The lyrics are irreverent and often unexpected, emphasising the story and very carefully adding feeling at just the right moments. It is impossible not to be drawn in by this very thoughtful, self-aware performance that has been crafted to look just like we are watching it being crafted. It is immediate, truthfully observed and shows real heart and energy.

www.nie-theatre.com

Paper Cinema / BAC: The Paper Cinema’s Odyssey

To attempt The Odyssey in any media could never be described as an easy option. The Paper Cinema are a company creating moving pictures out of paper, projected onto a screen – their style is intriguing, engaging and many-layered, and is enhanced by live music. In choosing The Odyssey as their subject matter, it is almost as if they are making a statement about their ambitions, testing the scope of their media and their own skills as craftsmen of stories as well as craftsmen of illustrations, paper cuttings, projections and music.

They pull it off – though this is not a particularly sophisticated telling of the story, and you can see that the company are still more interested in their processes and material craft than gripped by the tales of Odysseus and his travels. Nevertheless, a complex story is told and it suits the paper animation style and the experimental live scoring.

The filmic model is inverted and the creators of the animation – two artists and three musicians – are seated before us on the stage, with a large projection screen beyond them. The screen is clearly the central focus and we are drawn to it, but the show is lit in such a way that we are invited to engage with the artists and musicians too.

On the left we have Nicholas Rawling and Imogen Charleston, who create the animations. Between them they manipulate seemingly hundreds of cardboard cut-outs throughout the 70 minute performance, each intricately designed and drawn on in black ink. They also create drawings live in ink and manage their own cameras for projecting onto the screen beyond. The drawings are spiky and children’s-book-like. Sharp teeth and dark forests give way to boiling seas and dense and whirling clouds. The story is stripped down to leave us with the main characters of Odysseus, his long-suffering wife Penelope, and his fast-growing son Telemachus. Because they are drawings, they are curiously static when they travel long distances, and their faces are poker still although their animation does convey a surprising amount of emotion.

And yet there is a reason why the company has put themselves into the title of this show. We are never watching The Odyssey, but their recreation of it. When a certain clever manipulation of paper puppets produces a particularly effective movement or image, we are impressed with Paper Cinema’s process and pleased that we can see how it’s done, rather than drawn further into the story. We delight in being able to see through the cut-out windows of Odysseus and Penelope’s castle – and it’s like looking into a dolls-house; there are lots of oohs and aahs as we catch sight of the little details. This is all about their processes, and their skill at maintaining this level of detail for such a long time.

The music too is layered and carefully crafted, bringing all manner of musical tools and processes together. A musical saw makes way for voice, electric guitar for thunder sheet. We even have dolby surround-sound in the form of a wind-chime on a string that tinkles at the back of the audience at particularly magical moments. The score keeps the artists on track beautifully and their interaction is often as riveting as the onscreen action.

An aftershow discussion is enlightening and we get to see the original ‘map’ of the show created by Nicholas Rawling. It is sprawling, with tiny scribbled figures and monsters all over it. These guys are true artists and it is fascinating to watch them experimenting with the format that they have already developed so successfully (this is their second full-length show).