Strange Arrangement - Drifters

Strange Arrangement: Drifters

Strange Arrangement - DriftersIt’s like the start of a joke: an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a German are stranded together in the same boat. What happens next? Well in Hampshire-based Strange Arrangement’s gently comic and at times moodily inventive sea-show, they let their imaginations run wild in an attempt to stave off boredom and desperation.

Englishman William (Alex Mangan) finds himself shipmates with Joey (Ivan Hall) and Hans (Nigel Luck, who also co-directed the show). Together, they’re a warm-hearted and motley crew, with a penchant for fantastical adventures, pranks, and melancholic turns. As there’s a bit of a three-way language barrier, the interaction is all physical and visual, with effective use of the vessel’s brown-paper sails and other flotsam and jetsam to entertain and distract each other in the face of encroaching suicidal thoughts.

There are some memorable images, in particular a swelling sea, conjured from a sheet of black plastic billowed aloft with fans, which mutates into two giant, malevolent rolling and buffeting balls, suggesting a wilder, darker side to the crew’s collective experiences of life at sea. Sue Dacre’s beautiful puppets are also one of the show’s highlights. Strung up on the rigging like memento mori, these wizened brown-paper body parts and lovely expressive heads, half-animal, half-human, are assembled and reassembled into different creatures that haunt the ship in some of the piece’s most absorbing sequences.

Towards the end of the performance things take on a more reflective bent, and there’s a glimpse of the stark reality of their situation, as William and Hans remember crew mates lost at sea – a welcome tonal complication in a piece that otherwise feels determinedly buoyant. Perhaps a show that’s explicitly about drifting is inevitably going to feel a little lacking in direction, or unanchored, but the piece’s monotonous rhythm, which is constantly looking for the next idea, doesn’t support satisfying development of the characters or their relationships. If this engaging emerging company can stick with and build on some of its image-making – in which they’ve evidently no shortage of ideas and skills – then their work may really set sail.

Presented as part of NEW VISIONS LIVE – a platform for emerging UK-based artists at Bristol Festival of Puppetry