A popcorn machine, indeed – the popped corn littering the stage, the smell of burnt oil and singed corn filling the room. Not only, but also: a wonky honky-tonk piano, whirring fan wobbling atop, dry ice puffing out from below; a trunk-load of dismembered mannequins, hands and feet and heads juggled and rolled; a dislocated chandelier trailing fairy lights and ringing with birdsong; a rail of clothing probably salvaged from an am dram group’s cupboard; a trapeze hanging ominously empty centre-stage; various chairs and cellos and amps and guitars; and four louche young people eyeing up the audience insolently, here downstage at the lip of their space chewing non-existent gum, there dragging each other across the space by the hair or ears, and now playing 60s psychedelic garage band guitar solos in party-shop shades.
Although My!Laika look and sound like they could be the bastard child of Forced Entertainment and Os Mutantes, they are in fact the latest hot young circus company from France to be picked up by the London International Mime Festival – laureates of the prestigious Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe (2010). I say ‘from France’, but individually they hail from far and wide: the sole male performer, Salvatore Frasca, is from Italy, and the three women come from Argentina (Eva Ordoñez-Benedetto), Germany (Philine Dahlmann), and Holland (Elske van Gelder).
And oh what a combo, a match made in hell! And how cleverly they weave their wonderfully warped circus acts into this distressed domestic-apocalyptic environment! Eva Ordoñez-Benedetto has the air of a blood-drained victim of Count Dracula. White-robed, red lipped, vacant-eyed she alternates her time onstage between slumping dazed in a chair upstage, muttering voiceless words with an unblinking stare, and performing the most excruciatingly slow and tortured solo trapeze act you could possibly imagine, often with very minimal use of her hands. I’ve seen and marvelled at the dreaded ‘neck hang’ before now; I’ve never seen it done by someone who looks like they’ve actually been hanged.
The other two women have what could loosely be described as an acrobalance partnership, which manifests as a kind of punk Mexican wrestling bout. The tall-and-lanky Dahlmann catches the short-and-muscley van Gelder by her long bleached-blonde hair. Aha, I think, the punchline is going to be that it’s a wig and it comes off, but no – she’s whirled around her partner’s body, and then across the stage, by her hair, which if not her own must be stuck on with superglue, and landing with an enormous thump. As she stares out at us, her head twisted under her partner’s arm, she looks just like the dismembered mannequin head placed on the piano. The pony-tailed and mascara’d one then races full-tilt at her goggle-eyed adversary, more or less running up her body in a wild flying kick. At one point Frasca tries to intervene but he’s caught by his ears and seen off easily.
He’s a great clown – tall and gangly, spouting cod philosophy, leering and posing, juggling dismembered limbs, riding a trick cycle through the debris in his ludicrously tight nylon underpants, or acting out his rock-star guitarist dreams lying prone on the stage floor. The foursome pass the baton of stage spotlight to each other with ease – all disguised as a fearsome battle for attention with ever-more outrageous actions.
Frank Zappa, Jackie Chan, Kurt Schwitters, and The Ramones are all cited influences – the hook that caught my interest. Who wouldn’t want to see a show with that publicity blurb? What was gratifying was that it was all here, and more, in this marvellous Merz / punk / pop art / circus mash-up.
What a find! I feel like I’ve fallen in love (with someone I shouldn’t have fallen in love with), to quote The Buzzcocks, whose sounds see us out of the auditorium, exhausted but exhilarated.