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).