Rocamora Theatre: Small Suicides: Three Brief Exorcisms of Quotidian Use

Almost without being noticed, an unassuming elderly man crosses the stage and starts addressing us in a thickly evocative Spanish accent. Carles Cañellas tells us that Small Suicides was made in 1984, that he saw it performed by its Hungarian creator, Gulya Molnàr, several times, and that Molnàr gave him permission to take it on. While he’s talking, he removes his jacket and shoes carefully and deliberately and puts on another pair of shoes and another jacket. It’s considered, precise, the objects telling the story with him: Cañellas literally steps into Molnàr’s shoes. It’s a lovely way of framing this charming and eccentric piece of performance-philosophy, priming us for a show concerned with mutable identities and what it means to take on a life.

In Cañellas’s hands, everyday consumables are animated in such a way that they express something essential about themselves. Less puppeteer and more enabler, Cañellas gives voice to the objects with chirrups and mutters, his mobile features child-like with mischief and delight as their stories play out. A match falls in love with a coffee bean. An Alka-Seltzer tries to pass itself off as confectionery. In each case, the very use which defines the item is the inevitable means of its self-destruction: the match is lit, the Alka-Seltzer dissolved. It’s ingenious and absorbing.

The show isn’t best served by its presentation in the Tobacco Factory theatre, where its physical smallness, upon the full appreciation of which a lot of the subtlety of its ideas depends, is problematic rather than eloquent. The majority of the performance takes place on a table top, illuminated by a single bulb shaded with a brown paper bag, and from the sixth row I was squinting. But it’s not just what you can see: what you can hear – the crunch of peanut shells, the rip of the struck match, rustle of sweet wrappers, fizz of water, the sounds of real things happening in the lives and deaths of the animated consumables – is essential, and at times was lost.

The show did stay with me in a surprising and sweet way, however. When I got home and set about preparing a snack, I was peculiarly conscious of things that I’d ordinarily take for granted, like the way a teabag reacts to being doused in boiling water as if it’s been scalded, or the way blueberries in a bowl jiggle when they’re being rinsed under a running tap in a way that only blueberries do. Everyday objects seemed animate with the very uniqueness of their own life forces. Small Suicides had shifted in a tiny way how I experienced the world, and for that I was grateful.

Maria Rud, Ross Ashton & Evelyn Glennie: The AniMotion Show

I was fortunate to catch the final twenty-five minutes of Aurora Nova’s large scale show in the ‘Hogwarts’ school quad. The location is superb. Tucked behind the vast gothic buildings, it is an enclosed square with a dominant tower and corner staircases heading spookily upwards.

There is a sense of awe and hush from the eighty or so people standing or sitting here. Some stroll about, others just stare. They are looking at an enormous colourful painting being projected onto the crenellated wall, textural and splashy, forming into human and animal shapes, becoming abstract, being swept or sponged away. The hands doing this belong to Russian artist Maria Rud who has a big smile and flaming red hair. Maria is responding to a percussive score being played by virtuoso musician Evelyn Glennie, who bounces around a large set of instruments with vigour and panache.

The imagery is very Russian and has a religious flavour. Is that Ivan The Terrible? It’s an illustrative style reminiscent of 1950s children’s books on ancient history, all earthy colours and patterning. The scenes are choreographed to fit the shape of the architecture by projection artist Ross Ashton.

The finale is a solo for gong, with Glennie on her knees in the centre of the façade, very slowly building up resonance as the painting swirls around and over her. The sound of the castle fireworks bounces off the quad walls as the gong gets louder and Maria works and reworks her final image.

AniMotion is a proper festival event; accessible, interesting, beautifully performed, and providing a good thump of emotional impact. You may only want to see it once, as the images, if not the music, are pretty exactly repeated each night, but you certainly won’t forget it.

Pickled Image: Coulrophobia

Dik Downey and Adam Blake look pretty much how we expect clowns to look, with over-sized trousers, too-big boots, red noses, and hair as if they’ve just stuck their fingers in a plug socket. And to begin with, they behave pretty much as we expect clowns to behave: all silly walks, happy-sad faces, and roping the audience in to playing squeaky-toy orchestra.

But then it starts to get weird. Not creepy-weird but meta-theatrical-weird. When Adam shines a torch into his face and adopts an evil grin, Dik accuses him of having crossed the line and strayed into scary-clown territory. Dik and Adam, we soon realise, don’t really know what they’re doing, and heading through the doorframe to ‘backstage’ (we can still see them, although Dik insists we can’t) to consult the script is only intermittently helpful. Not only this, but their very existence is subject to the whim of their foul-mouthed and sadistic boss, Poco, the archetypal ‘scary clown’, who exerts a puppet-master’s control over the pair, sending them into a hilarious, dark and dirty dance routine whenever they undermine his authority. Unsurprisingly, they want out.

Throughout, the show gleefully subverts our expectations of clowns and puppets and plays fast and loose with the boundaries of its theatrical world. There’s palpable relish in seeing what it’s possible to get away with, how far they’ll go and how far we’ll go with them. Pretty far, it turns out. We’re easily roped in to service their games and plots, whether that’s being romanced by a love-struck Adam or, in the case of the man sitting in the row in front of me, having shoes and socks forcibly removed by Dik so that he can demonstrate sock puppets. It’s joyfully anarchic.

At the heart of the show are two hugely generous and skilful performances, full of wit and vulnerability. Dik’s clown is at once naive and indignant, Adam’s by turns wistful and sardonic. They’re an endlessly watchable double act, manifesting all the unhealthily intense affection and antagonism of a codependent relationship.

Coulrophobics (those who fear clowns, of course) have nothing to fear: the pair’s subjugation by Poco is intriguing and bizarre rather than genuinely menacing, though a little more threat here might help propel the piece forward: their desperation to escape only really becomes apparent as a driver in the latter third of the show, when their failure to outwit Poco results in the ultimate humiliation (there is a warning in advance that the show contains full frontal nudity).

It’s sublimely entertaining and thoroughly deserved the extended applause it received from its full house, setting the bar high at the start of Bristol Puppetry Festival – a programme that asks us to expect the unexpected and consistently challenges what visual theatre is.

Dreamthinkspeak: Absent

Dreamthinkspeak has an international reputation for creating extraordinary immersive theatre installations and its latest production, Absent, is a welcome addition to its canon.

The experience begins before you enter the building. The transformation of the exterior of Shoreditch Town Hall into a hotel is so effective that I actually walked straight past it. Inspired by the life of the Duchess of Argyll, who lived in a luxury hotel until eventually evicted, the piece is a haunting exploration of loneliness, declining gentility and corporate greed.

The audience is free to wander a building in transition, filled with ghosts of the past and glimpses of the future.

Artistic Director Tristan Sharps has always been fascinated by architectural models and here they are a perfect fit for the subject. Absent is about a building changing from grand to functional and we are potential investors on a viewing. The switches from macro to micro make sense. The Shoreditch Group’s profits are booming, room rates start at £60, the project will regenerate the area. It is grimly real. Just read the Evening Standard.

As in most of his work, Sharps plays here with scale and form, using film and false mirrors, inviting us through wardrobe doors into barren spaces, leaving clues of habitation. Here a bottle of Chantal perfume on a creaky shelf, its scent pervading the room, there a pile of Burmatex carpet tiles ready for laying. I felt like a forensic scientist investigating a missing person.

It is not a spoiler to say (as Sharps did on Radio 4) that there is a lack of physical presence in the piece. Had I known in advance, I would have spent more time observing the one live actress playing Margaret de Beaumont. Fortunately the filmed world is compelling and evocative, featuring a luminous performance by Marion Déprez.

Absent is a simpler piece to those of recent years but no less powerful. In The Beginning Was The End (2013), at Somerset House, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci, was playful and interactive, brightly lit and slightly scary. Before I Sleep, which I saw at the old Co-Op in Brighton, 2010, was a lavish and thrilling take on The Cherry Orchard with a cast of hundreds. Whereas in those productions the building was a space in which to make the work, in Absent the building is the work. There are some familiar tropes – the bringing of ‘outside’ into this interior landscape, a child, a gentle sound-score, and the silent guides. If the scale is more of a novella than epic, it remains a beautifully executed experience.

On leaving, you can’t help but notice how pertinent the vision is, with gentrification all around. The former magistrates’ court and police station opposite is, guess what? A hotel.

Komische Oper Berlin | 1927: The Magic Flute

A chorus line with wolf heads and cartoon gartered legs; a dazzling psychedelic explosion of flowers, fairies, and butterflies; and Terry Gilliam-style cog-filled heads. Chinese dragon-serpents chasing their own tails; spear-carrying monkeys; and an aria-singing spider woman.

Welcome to the crazy world of Komische Oper Berlin’s The Magic Flute.

Co-directed by Barrie Kosky and 1927 theatre company’s Suzanne Andrade, with animation by 1927’s Paul Barritt, the work bears the immediately recognisable signature of that enterprising company’s work. A magical blend of live and screen action, the performers interacting with surreally funny animation, so that they become part of a live comic book; silent-movie style titles, replacing dialogue with beautiful black-and-white graphics; and a countless number of nods to the 1920s Hollywood heyday, with homages to Buster Keaton, Nosferatu, and Louise Brooks built in.

It is almost three hours (with one interval) and it is both exhilarating and exhausting. Paul Barritt excels himself with animation sequences that at times make your eyes ache; and the stage is agog with opera singers fighting off shadowy wolves, popping their heads through holes in the screen to sing perfect top ‘c’s, or donning beards and dashing up to the boxes to sing the choral parts.

I’m no opera expert, but I know that Die Zauberflote / The Magic Flute is Mozart’s last great work; that its bizarre and incredible (even to fans of fantasy) storyline remains a puzzle; and that it is often played with vaudevillian pizzazz. Although perhaps never more so than in this case. The music sounds fine and dandy to my untutored ears, with Olga Pudova impressive as the Queen of the Night spider woman, Dominik Koninger a winner as the Keaton-esque Papageno, Allan Clayton doing a great job as the pale-skinned kohl-eyed Tamino, and Brooks/Andrade lookalike Maureen McKay rising to the demands of a very physical rendition of her role as Pamina.

The story is so batty it hardly bears telling: a daft and convoluted fairy tale of lost voices, magical musical instruments, and trials of temptation, which features a lost prince, a bird catcher, a giant serpent, a witchy Queen of the Night, and various lost and found loves. But no one cares how silly it all is – in fact, this is celebrated in a production that exploits the ludicrous possibilities the bizarre imagery of the libretto offers. It also tightens up the stage action by replacing dialogue with titles.

The interaction between live and screen action is understandably far less sophisticated than in 1927’s own shows – these are opera singers, not physical theatre performers – but there are clever shortcuts and tricks to show them to best advantage. And of course, no expense is spared. This is opera budgets, not experimental theatre, we’re talking.

There are criticisms, from the perspective of someone who has followed 1927’s work since they won the Total Theatre Award for Best Newcomer at the Fringe a mere eight years ago. I don’t feel that comfortable with the company cannibalising their own work. Or perhaps it is director Barrie Kosky who has encouraged them to do so? In the programme notes he declares himself a fan of their first show, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea.

I find it uncomfortable seeing imagery from that show and its successor, The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, regurgitated here. For example, the image of Papageno running on the spot with cartoon animation legs is a direct lift from the image of Esme Appleton doing that very same thing at the beginning of Between the Devil. And the wolf-dogs, cats, moon rising over the roof are familiar. The chorus of women looking just like Suzanne Andrade’s character in the first show is surreal, and not necessarily in a good way. Perhaps the company would argue that these are visual motifs that they choose to repeat from show to show – and fair enough, close on three hours is a lot to fill!

But I’m personally much more comfortable when the imagery moves clearly into new territory unique to this production – and there are some staggeringly wonderful things. Gorgeously drawn tarot cards, knife-throwing spiders, flowers that sprout heads, exploding hearts, steampunk elephants, whirring insects… the images tip out one after the other. The one animation sequence that confuses me is the Pink Elephants on Parade homage to Disney’s Dumbo. It’s clever – but hard to understand what it is doing here.

And I have to say that whilst I commend the company taking up offers to move into new territory, I really do miss composer/musician Lilian Henley’s lovely presence. The production is on one level very 1927 – but on another level, it feels incomplete, and occasionally a pastiche of itself. I suppose that’s because the extraordinary vision of 1927’s three shows (the two previously mentioned and current touring production Golem) comes from the unique combination that is made by all four of the core company members working together, and the input of regular collaborators such as costume designer Sarah Munro (from The Insect Circus – a lot of her influence is evident here too). Or is my slight discomfort something to do with being in on something at the start and being startled by seeing it go mainstream? I will own up to a little of that too…

Yet still – an extraordinary and dazzling production. It all goes with a swing, and the packed audience at the Festival Theatre for the Edinburgh International Festival opening frequently bursts into spontaneous applause, rising to a standing ovation at the end as the company, directors, animator, and conductor take numerous curtain call bows.