Mel Brimfield & Gwyneth Herbert: Springtime for Henry (and Barbara)

Imagine – it’s opening night of a long-awaited new musical on London’s West End. Can director Larry Goldblatt (David Bedella) succeed where Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir Peter Hall, and Peter Brook have failed? Will the book surpass those of Harold Pinter, Howard Brenton, or National Treasure Alan Bennett? Might the music eclipse that of Stephen Sondheim?

The audience gurgles with anticipation. We’re about to witness, in musical theatre style, the tempestuous relationship between a truly great artist and another artist (a woman), and the whole history of modernism – all in 70 minutes!

This is the premise of Mel Brimfield and Gwyneth Herbert’s joyful show about Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, staged at Wilton’s for three performances only, with a hastily-gathered top-notch cast, a punchy band, and PowerPoint. Described by the makers as ‘a fictitious lost musical reconstructed in fragments’, it neatly skewers gender politics, artistic status, and performing arts practice, in one sweep of its razor-sharp chisel.

The back story to the musical’s three decades of wrangling by theatrical luminaries is told via a spoof Arena TV programme. It sets the tone for the evening: clever, funny writing and inventive music, brought to life in performance and on film.

The Starling Arts Choir opens the show, rehearsing Truth to Materials. Their voices are stratified: sopranos are marble, altos are plaster, basses bronze, belting out that they are ‘together releasing the form’ – as much a comment on contemporary performance as it is a definition of modernist sculpture. This subtle intelligence is at play throughout.

There is the characterization of Henry as a DH Lawrence archetype, pictured hugging the ‘vital trunks’ of trees, while Barbara moons over dangling catkins and pink anemones. Andrew C Wadsworth is a glorious Henry, with just the right amount of swagger and Yorkshire vowels, singing a lusty paean to Adel Rock. As Barbara, Frances Ruffele’s solo show-stopping number defines the status of women in art through lines like ‘My shapes were bold, his were archetypal.’ She inhabits a world where stone replaces the glass in the ceiling. We feel for Barbara chipping away at her monumental blocks, quietly changing the face of British sculpture – from representation into abstraction – in the shadow of the Yorkshire titan and his money-making enterprises.

The personal relationship between sculptors is deftly traced. Henry’s star rises while Barbara cares for the triplets, his international reputation burgeoning while she has Hull.

It is a shame that the ambition, stated in the publicity, for ‘breathtaking set design’ didn’t manifest at these performances. I missed the visual elements that looked so alluring in pre-show clips. There are spoken interludes, featuring the rounded tones of Hugh Ross as The Critic, and moments of recorded interviews against archive film that would have benefitted from a richer palette, particularly given the grandeur of the space. The performances are all first rate; David Bedella (Jerry Springer’s Satan), reading from notes, injects real West-End glamour.

Hopefully the piece will be developed further and the slightly odd conjunctions and transitions eased out. I wonder too whether leaving us with the refrain of Springtime for Hitler and Germany (from The Producers) is the right decision? It does scan beautifully as Henry and Barbara, but given Gwyneth’s evident talent for a song and a tune, it would have been great to have left humming something of hers.

Mel Brimfield has been delving into the lives of artists for several years, creating wonderfully playful films and installations that pack a punch. It was lovely to hear Joanna Neary’s pitch-perfect narration to a film of Barbara Hepworth at work (from 2011). This final fragment of the evening overturned the whole premise of the musical, showing that Barbara too was driven and pompous; ‘Sometimes a low wattage bulb is just what one needs’ she drawls, referring to Henry’s mediocrity.

Springtime for Henry (and Barbara) has been lovingly developed by two highly accomplished and idiosyncratic talents, and I for one would be thrilled to see it take its natural place on Broadway.

Alexander Vantournhout & Bauke Lievens: Aneckxander

This calming and charming performance, subtitled A Tragic Autobiography of the Body, showcases Vantournhout, stripped of all clothing, as he progresses through a series of mini-acts adorning himself with objects, skills, and human expression. The collaboration between performer Alexander Vantournhout and dramaturge Bauke Lievens sets out to redefine contemporary circus by exploring the role of the performer in relation to form, narrative, and objects.

Vantournhout’s opening charms the audience with a sly grin and a split second striptease, transforming from a fully clothed professional into a fully naked clown so quickly that it is almost missable, using harlequin flooring as a shield for the trick. A slightly delayed realisation of what is playfully presented in front of us sets a tone for laughter and giggles that persists throughout the performance. The shedding of clothes sheds too our sense of the body’s function, moving instead towards pure form. The slow and subtle body isolations which follow are clear and unusual, abstracting the body but never fully shedding the sense of humanness and humour protected by Vantournhout’s nudity and twinkly eyes.

The movement vocabulary of the performance explores the precise workings and proportions of Vantournhout’s body. He distorts and isolates limbs and body parts to play on the assumptions he has outlined that his neck is too long and his legs too short. Training the extension of his neck to make grotesque shapes extends his own body’s limits, highlighting the absurdity of those assumptions whilst commenting on the adaptability of the body to achieve technical and physical goals. He extends his ‘short legs’ with the addition of a pair of platform boots. His physical phrases deliberately alter, or edit, his body’s autobiography. Using a series of repeated phrases to deconstructed Arvo Pӓrt compositions on a keyboard, a pair of platform shoes, boxing gloves, and finally an Elizabethan ruffled collar are donned one at a time on each repetition. The vocabulary expands into undulating, turning, and cart-wheeling with no clear up or down, beginning or end. Vantournhout’s relationship with the objects alternates between being aided and inhibited by them, as they are incorporated into a developed and altered version of the previous vocabulary.

Tumbling through shoulder stands, handstands, turns and rolls, he exerts himself into momentum only to abandon the commitment to the pose; he breaks the perfection and mastery of the body, quite literally falling out of his choreography. As heavy-booted landings produce loud thuds, the elegance of suspension is juxtaposed with the fall as Vantournout’s energy is altered. Then, in contradiction to this, the movement becomes more acrobatic, his large falls and somersaults now cushioned, last minute, by the boxing gloves. The choreography is now only made possible by the props that have hindered it. The irony displayed through the humour of the work creates an evolving rather than failing body, whose dynamic relationship between skill and object empowers the performer through the celebration of the fail rather than in traditional mastery of a prop.

Yet it’s silly too and the audience gasp and giggle at risky landings and stretching tongues and foreskins. The tragic act’s ‘non-ending’ leaves this clown twirling and playing with his fake tongue. With no formal ending, the audience are instructed to stay as long as they wish and the piece descends into the antidote of a final show-stopping spectacle, an anti-climax true to the tragic circus performer but funny and charming throughout.

Jakop Ahlbom Company: Horror

Horror is postmodern montage of silly, supernatural, creepy, and outrageously gory tricks that has a packed auditorium squirming, laughing, and jumping as the climactic scenes keep coming one after the other. Three friends come across an abandoned house and enter Little Red Riding Hood style in red capes; we are immediately aware of their vulnerability and, true -to-expectation, a sequence of catastrophes propels the characters through events that both dislocate and relocate, time, space and person within ghostly narratives and brutal situations.

Ahlbom throws his performers right into scenes projected live onto a large gauze screen, so they are both within the action and outside it, discovering themselves acting within a horror. He breaks and reaffirms the fourth wall continually, using an array of magical visual effects. What appears to be a live stream is merged seamlessly with recordings that reveal ghostly additions to an otherwise empty stage. Changing camera angles and a figure literally diving out of the television screen confuse our sense of reality and the performers’, playing thoughtfully the idea of just who is watching who with a brutal awareness that maintains the sense of doubt and illusion.

It’s all highly theatrical, whilst borrowing heavily, inevitably, from film and TV. Personified monsters, frolicking lovers, and fights for dear life are crafted through a choreography of lifts and falls, using all the technicalities of contemporary dance alongside the qualities of a doomed character facing the axe in the middle of a horror show. Zombies and levitating characters are made stronger by choreographic phrases which set the scene for and enforce the spectacle made by special effects. A man possessed by his evil hand wriggles, wallops, and catapults across the stage at the mercy of his appendage which scuttles about the stage after being eventually chopped off in a fountain of blood. Countless references to the genre like this pay homage to films such as The Hand, The Shining and The Exorcist, and an eager and committed audience delight in their personal discoveries of these in the post-show discussion. The rocky music score that transforms fighting dance scenes into punchy comic strip phrases develops these references, whilst making audiences jump out of their skins as piercing sounds accompany flashes of light and ghostly appearances.

Cinematic effects, gore, and disappearances defy your expectations in a series of spectacular triumphs that seem to magically overcome theatre’s practical limitations and Ahlhom carefully navigates post-show questions so as not to reveal the mechanics behind his work. Seemingly instant transportation from the house to a forest installed behind another gauze screen, an arm reaching down the throat of a character, levitating and disappearing characters; all remain clothed in mystery.

Small World

Dorothy Max Prior has the pleasure of two intimate performance pieces presented at London International Mime Festival 2016

Two shows for small audience groups, set around tabletops, in rooms squirrelled away in the basements of arts centres. But oh such different shows!

David Espinosa: Mi Gran Obra

David Espinosa’s Mi Gran Obra works on creating distance; playing with scale. Although we are tightly grouped around the table – tall people on high stools at the back, shorter people on low stools upfront –we view the scenes enacted with tiny models on the tabletop through opera glasses. When Espinosa’s hands come into view, we jump back at the sight of the hands of a giant. Or of a malicious god toying with his creations – this is, after all, a show exploring the theme of megalomania.

The piece works as an evolving series of tableau in miniature. Tucked beneath the operator’s table (Espinosa does everything in this show – object manipulation, lights, sound) are trays of tiny model railway people, plastic animals, and toy helicopters. Also to-hand are a reading lamp, a couple of red bike lights, a pot plant, and a tambourine. On the table, a pair of mini speakers each sport a band of musicians perched aloft: a rock group and a military brass band.

The first tableau gives us a procession from cradle to grave, a diagonal line across the table. Later, we see a fabulous wedding photo group that features a Mexican Mariachi band; a beach scene sporting posing athletes and a posse of toy bulls, with a car crash to the side; an even more surreal scene featuring elephants, monkeys and Santas; and a magnificent miniature sex scene, in which the earth moves… and moves. The pot plant serves as a graveyard; the bike lights turn the tabletop into a disco, replete with pole dancer; the tambourine becomes the podium for a kind of open-topped doll’s house, where the beds get put to good use, until the savage god hammers nails into the tambourine, sending everything flying. The soundtrack gives us an eclectic mix, from Mexican marches to Latino covers of hits like Hotel California.

If there is a reservation, it is in the use of a tablet screen, integrated into the action on two or three occasions. It is hard to see the screen if you are sitting to the side of the table, and in any case it feels an irrelevant addition.

That aside, Mi Gran Obra (subtitled ‘an ambitious project’) is a fabulously clever adult take on the childish pleasures of play – anyone who has ever enjoyed Playmobile, Lego, or Sylvanian families, or perhaps liked those bargain packs of plastic model soldiers, will appreciate the appeal. In David Espinosa’s hands, his little model people (bought from Hornby Trains and numerous other companies across Europe) become the actors in a grandiose theatre with a cast of hundreds. Life, death and everything in between is played out before our eyes, with humour and pathos. When the tiny people are squashed by giant hands, or bulldozed into a pile, there is an audible intake of breath in the room. Luckily, the piece ends with an image of hope – a great relief. A postmodern puppetry for the modern world.

Xavier Bobes: Things Easily Forgotten

Xavier Bobes’ Things Easily Forgotten is a very different beast; a show that from the outset celebrates intimacy. Espinosa delivers a mini-lecture at the start of his show, explaining his motivations and outlining the provenance of the show, giving us the intellectual task of imagining that what we are about to see would exist at 37 times the scale, if the little people where life-size. Bobes, on the other hand, keeps things close to his heart. As we enter the ante-room, he is firmly in performance mode: not quite ‘in character’, but certainly ‘in persona’, dressed in a neat brown suit and tie, and sporting an elegant wristwatch. Our vintage tickets are clipped with a hole-puncher, and we enter a dark room.

As the audience of five sit down, placing our hands on the table as a candle is lit, it feels for all the world as if a seance is about to begin. And indeed this is not so far from the truth – what we get for the next thrilling 75 minutes is a cross between a seance, a family gathering, and a magic show, as the dead of Spain’s twentieth century are conjured up for us through an extraordinary array of printed ephemera, everyday objects, and crackly sounds that come from a vinyl record player. Our host holds the space beautifully – sometimes silently, sometimes drawing us in with text. At the end, we are asked not to reveal too much about the show, so I will honour that request and refrain from saying what he does and how he does it, and focus instead on how it makes me feel.

It leaves me with the sort of bittersweet melancholy you feel when you find a cache of old photographs in your grandmother’s wardrobe; or you find an old newspaper in a junk shop that is from the year of your birth. It appeals to the part of me that is fascinated by portraits of people I don’t know; whose lives are frozen in a moment in time – forever young, or forever ‘just married’, or forever walking down that seaside promenade. If you are a hoarder, who keeps old matchbooks, redundant banknotes, and souvenir keyrings in dusty corners of your loft, then this is the show for you. There is an added poignancy for anyone with an interest in the painful history of Spain over the past 100 years, particularly the Franco years.

It is a theatre that finds a novel way to create a linear narrative – a timeline that tells the history of a people through the things they leave behind; creating a shared space of evocative sounds and images that I leave feeling touched and nurtured.

I applaud the brave and good decision by the London International Mime Festival to programme these intimate works for such small audience numbers. Small in scale, big in ambition: Mi Gran Obra and Things Easily Forgotten are both beautifully crafted visual theatre works that added something special to the festival – grand works that won’t easily be forgotten.

David Espinosa: Mi Gran Obra was seen at Tate Modern, 13 January 2016.

Xavier Bobes: Things Easily Forgotten was seen at Southbank Centre, 20 January 2016.

Presented as part of the London International Mime Festival 2016.

A Chamber of Wonders: Figurentheater Tübingen

Penny Francis interviews master puppeteer, Frank Soehnle of Figurentheater Tübingen, whose show Wunderkammer comes to the London International Mime Festival 2016

One of the world’s most distinguished creators of puppet theatre, Frank Soehnle, and his productions have added to the lustre surrounding this branch of the performing arts in the twenty-first century. His aesthetic is unique, always the hallmark of a true artist; his techniques of craftsmanship and staging, his company’s performances in terms of their poetry and precision of movement and manipulation are superb; his choices of a dramaturgy which integrates sculpture with movement, music with drama, the creepy with the comic, the refined with the coarse, are all the product of an original vision.

The company’s base, Tübingen, is a town some 30 kilometres from Stuttgart, where he was born. Co-founder of Figuren Theater Tübingen, is Karin Ersching – performer, puppeteer, director, lighting designer and tour manager. She worked in special education from 1987-93, and has independently given guest performances and workshops in many different countries. She also makes puppets and teaches manipulation to students. Soehnle also gives workshops, as he is scheduled to do in London on Saturday 6 February 2016 (a ‘weekend lab’ called Things on Strings), and he teaches in several schools and festivals of puppetry.

This year the company is back in the London International Mime Festival, where it has been three times before, with Flamingo Bar, Nachgesichter or Night Visions, salto.lamento (one of my all-time favourite theatre productions) and now Wunderkammer, a chamber of wonders or, as the programme has it, a Cabinet of Curiosities.

The Wunderkammer itself is like a strange museum where a number of fantastic objects, artistic, scientific and natural, are operated by stringed controls and given life by three expert marionettists. These puppeteers have come together in a common desire to pay homage to the doyen of the European marionette, the late Albrecht Roser. Each of the three was a student and friend of Roser, each is director of her/his own company: Frank Soehnle himself, Alice Therese Gottschalk of FAB Theater, and Raphael Mürle of Figurentheater Pforzheim. Each studied and/or taught in the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst, the Higher School of Music and the Performing Arts in Stuttgart, in the puppetry department founded by Albrecht Roser in 1983. Roser was introduced to Soehnle when he was only 15, and acknowledges him as his inspiration and generous mentor until his death in 2011.

Another aim of the creative team was and is a determination not just to keep the employment of the stringed puppet alive but to demonstrate that it can be as contemporary and experimental as any other type. The Tübingen company has been successfully accomplishing that for some years.

Soehnle is fundamentally a modernist, an admirer of the Dadaists and the Surrealists. His figures, always made by him, are like no others. They are often insubstantial, ghostly, sometimes made of ephemeral materials.They are ‘genderless hybrids, embodying transience and death’, although the characters can be as comic as they are sinister – defined, Soehnle says, as much by their movements as by their role. With string puppets the movement is dictated by the size and structure of the marionette, which may be tiny or gigantic. At some stage of their animated life they are inclined to become independent of their maker, seeming to be manipulating the puppeteer, not the other way round. The performer needs to find the figure’s ‘centre’, on which he or she goes to work to achieve the professional precision so important to puppet performance, within the choreography of the whole.

The shows are nearer to dance than drama, although they may be based on a literary text – by Kafka, Chekhov or Čapek for example. The literary story serves as the structure of the show but Soehnle captures the language in atmospheric stage pictures rather than speech. There are exceptions, for instance in one production, Gabriel García Marquez’ story of The Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, presented by the Tübingen company as With Enormous Wings, a narrator was pivotal to the action. (For the international tour each actor chosen to play the part was a native speaker of the country where it was shown.) There is no permanent group of players: a special team is chosen for each show, sometimes four or five, sometimes only one. Soehnle calls himself the ‘soul’ of the work, where sculpture and music are essential elements, but his own fantastic imagination always at its core.

In the making of Wunderkammer the whole company played a part. The concept was inspired and framed by the music of Bradley Kemp, a jazz musician brought over from New York, who supplemented the compositions of Michael Wollny and Tamar Halperin. Within this framework the creation of the show was an open collaborative process, developed by a company of artists incomparably rich in talent and united in their creative aim. It has resulted in a beautiful and intriguing series of scenes in which stringed artefacts are animated in various modes and moods, both serious and comedic.

Soehnle seems to be at the height of his powers, and the company’s future is full of promise, with five or six projects ‘in the oven’ in various stages of realisation, students to be taught, tours to be undertaken. Their immediate activity concerns the revival of Nachtgesichter, already up and running in the prestigious Komische Oper, the Comic Opera House of Berlin, where the Intendant or Artistic Director is the Australian Barrie Kosky, a friend and admirer of the Tübingen company. Soehnle made the puppets for Kosky’s 2012 production of Orfeo. Kosky’s recent version of Mozart’s Magic Flute, created in collaboration with the 1927 theatre company, and presented across Europe, and to great acclaim at the Edinburgh International Festival 2015.

In 2009 a fine book was produced by Wilfried Nold, a specialist in puppet books based in Frankfurt, about the activities of the Tübingen company. Beautifully produced and with illustrations on every page, it is simply called Figuren Theater Tübingen, Creationen 1991-2009 and would be a fine addition to the library of every enthusiast of visual theatre.

Few companies have been chosen for the London International Mime Festival four times: it is proof of the high regard for Frank Soehnle’s productions held by the co-directors of the festival Joseph Seelig and Helen Lannaghan, who are as excited to present Wunderkammer as we are to see it.

Figurentheater Tübingen’s Wunderkammer plays at the Barbican, 2–6 February 2016, 7.45pm. Book here:

Frank Soehnle and Alice Therese Gottschalk teach a one-day workshop at the Barbican on Saturday 6 February entitled Things on Strings, also part of the London International Mime Festival.

Total Theatre