This show might easily have been a final assessment piece on an MA in Contemporary European Theatre. You can tick off the influences of Beckett, Pirandello, Artaud and Brook in a fairly predictable avant-gardist collage of existential quips, grotesque physicality and random dangling objects (unused). There is evidence of strong performing ability, particularly the female performer in the headscarf who has some engaging interactions with the audience, but the overall effect on me was a sense of alienation. Not the purposive, Brechtian form of alienation but the simple sense that I just didn’t get it; not the jokes, or the plot or the point. I was immediately discombobulated by the strange opening, when the action began on stage before the lights went down on the audience. A similar device occurs at the end, when the lights go down but the soundtrack continues and we’re left waiting to see who will start the clapping. These feel like confusing breaks with useful conventions rather than the daring departures from stale theatrical norms I assume they the company are aiming for.
Admittedly, I have been around this kind of work for a long time now and less jaded spectators might better appreciate its spirit of experimentalism. It is performed with enthusiastic conviction, mixing characters and themes fromDon Quixote and Hamlet in a fragmentary exploration of delusion, death and meaninglessness. There are some striking visual elements, such as when umbrellas transform into the eyes of a monster with a giant devouring mouth, and later into a well-choreographed sea of jellyfish. It is easy to appreciate these sections for their aesthetic pleasure, but the sections of text suggested there were intended meanings I wasn’t receiving. It doesn’t help that Don Quixote himself only ever speaks in Spanish. Early on this is immediately translated by Sancho Panza, but this trails off and I’m left wondering how much of his passionate monologues it might be useful for me to understand. The conclusion to the story seems to involve Don Quixote’s realisation that his girlfriend is actually his horse, but I’m quite confident that I could be wrong.
There is an air of sincerity and commitment to the company that suggests this might be a necessary stage they are passing through on the way to something more engrossing, and their request for feedback at the end has a ring of sincere humility. Strangely, as the cast stood ready to take their bow I was struck by how engaging they suddenly were, out of character, relaxed and openly themselves.