‘Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.’ – WH Auden, Refugee Blues

Darkness, fear, fire, terror. Specifically, the plight of civilians caught in war zones – such subject matter is still not the norm for street theatre companies, and it is difficult to convey just how shocking and extraordinary it was in the mid-1990s, when Polish outdoor arts company Teatr Biuro Podróży came to the UK with Carmen Funebre (Funeral Song). The familiar street theatre tools of stilts, pyrotechnics, big visual pictures, rousing live sound, used for purposes beyond mere entertainment…

Now, a quarter of a century later Paweł Szkotak’s company return to the Edinburgh Fringe with that legendary show, together with its sequel, Silence.

Teatr Biuro Podrozy: Carmen Funebre

I’ve probably seen Carmen Funebre three or four times in all, and did wonder how it would fare so many years later. But far from feeling dated, it is a show that (sadly) always feels current, as you reframe it in your mind in light of whatever horrors are happening currently in the world. The show was originally devised from interviews made with survivors of the Bosnian conflict in the early 1990s. Now, you could substitute Iraq, Syria, Gaza…

Masked muscle men on tall stilts run into the space wielding whips, rounding up people from the crowd (planted actors, of course), forcing them to stand in line, strip to underwear, and enter the big grey metal gates at one end of the performance space. In another harrowing scene, a woman is captured and entwined in a long rope, pushed and pulled between a group of men who are passing around a bottle of wine and spitting on her. (And it is wine; we can smell it, just as we can feel the heat of the fire of the torchbearers, and hear the heavy beat of the drummers – this is a visceral performance, a real theatre of the senses.) It is a harrowing image of sexual abuse – just graphic enough to disturb without being so literal that we push the image away, unable to cope. Other scenes of violent confrontation and the aftermath of war are played out in similarly stylised ways: there is a wonderful image of three walking wounded returning from war, stilts becoming the men’s wooden legs with empty trouser-legs tied round them; men with photos of the loved ones left at home run up to the audience and tell us their names – ‘Gabriela’ is the one I’m shown; wooden stakes are hung with clothing that is set fire to, becoming forlorn funeral pyres. There is an ending, but there is no firm resolution…

Teatr Biuro Podrozy: Silence

The sequel, Silence, is if anything even more disturbing. I should here say that in the intervening years there have been very many other Teatr Biuro Podrozy shows, some of which – Pigs, Macbeth, Planet Lem – have come to the UK. And to note that Silence has been seen in the UK before, at the Greenwich & Docklands Festival and Hull Freedom Festival in 2016. There are issues about the programming of work that is usually presented free to audience as ticketed work at the Edinburgh Fringe, and indeed how difficult it is to programme outdoor arts within the Fringe – but that is a discussion for another article at another time!

Silence revisits the core theme of Carmen Funebre – how the horrors of war play out on civilian populations.

There are a number of returning motifs: the figure of Death in flowing purple robes; the Gladiator style stilt walkers; a tired red carpet rolled out. Live music is crucial to both shows (in Carmen, accordion and percussion; in Silence, strings and electronica). The set, similarly, includes a large metal construction at the back of the space that acts as the key visual focal point of the piece – in this case the grey prison is replaced by a big old bus, above which, picked out in lights is a quote that appears in both shows: ‘This city has ten million souls.’

Both shows have an eight-strong ensemble of actor/musicians who here multi-task as oppressors and as oppressed civilians. Here, the stilt-walking Gladiators are still around, but they give way to khaki-clad bullies bedecked in bullet belts roaring in on motorbikes. As for the oppressed: in Silence, the actors are augmented by eight child-sized mannequins manipulated by the performers. These incredibly spooky dolls, staring ahead motionless in whatever position they are placed in, are a harrowing representation of the voiceless, frozen-in-fear, powerless children from war-torn countries whose images haunt our TV screens and newspapers.

If Carmen Funebre was disturbing in its use of archetypal imagery, Silence both updates and ups the ante – whilst retaining the central idea that horror is best portrayed through non-naturalistic images. Hence the dolls: sitting in cages, stood in a line on top of the bus, passed or thrown out of windows as flames lick around them…

There are so many gasp-worthy visual pictures created in this windy yard in Edinburgh. We shiver with the cold, but also because of the spine-chilling images unfolding. Without wishing to reveal the ending, I will just say that the image / physical action chosen, which conjures up the plight of those escaping war by trying to cross the seas on flimsy boats, is devastatingly beautiful.

I’ve heard some people say that they feel Silence is weaker, far less successful than Carmen Funebre. On the contrary, others have said that the images in Silence are too strong, too disturbing. Well now – I remember the response to Carmen Funebre when it was first seen – loved by many, but disliked by others, deemed too disturbing for a street theatre show. Carmen Funebre has stood the test of time, and I believe Silence will too.

And it is good to reflect on the influence Teatr Biuro Podróży have had on the European street theatre sector – not least, for their influence on major UK companies such as Periplum.

It was an honour to have seen both shows together, on the same evening: to compare and contrast, and to feel the power of both. Together, they make for more than the sum of their parts – a magnificent achievement. I don’t suppose war, terror and displacement are going anywhere anytime soon, so no doubt there will be more in this vein to come from Teatr Biuro Podrozy in the future.

‘Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.’

Teatr Biuro Podrozy: Carmen Funebre

Teatr Biuro Podrozy: Silence runs 3–26 August 2018 at Pleasance EICC courtyard. Carmen Funebre was presented 16–19 August 2018. Featured image (top) is from Silence.

HG Wells’ The Time Machine, published in 1895, is sometimes credited with being the first sci-fi novel (although some might say that Mary Shelley beat him to it by 80 years with Frankenstein). Regardless, his novella, featuring the adventures of a man named only as The Time Traveller, is a seminal text, and this production reminds us that Wells’ ideas travel through time most magnificently, and seem as pertinent today as they were then.

This production of The Time Machine – elegantly combining puppetry and live performance, revelling in Victoriana, and chock full of hearty energy – is headed up by Rick Conte, who will be known to Total Theatre readers for his work on two Award winning puppetry shows, The Man Who Planted Trees, and Shona Reppe’s Cinderella. Top-notch design/scenography brings together beautifully made papier-mâché puppets (by Matt Rudkin, who appears live as The Time Traveller, side-by-side with his puppet self!); a gorgeous set design by Rebecca Hamilton, the main set-piece being a velvet-curtained doorway cum bookshelf cum fireplace that provides a great frame for both puppet and human action; and hand-painted image projections by the very talented Daisy Jordan.

The three-person team onstage –Matt Rudkin, Rick Conte, and Deborah Arnott – are brimming with robust energy, and it is all delivered as a rather cheery romp, playing up the gung-ho aspects of the story, and picking up on any opportunity for physical comedy. They all move with ease from character roles to Bunraku-style puppet operation and more, multi-tasking from the beginning to the end of the show.

The story in brief: The Time Traveller has invented a machine that can move in the fourth dimension, time. He tells his dinner guests at his house in a well-to-do part of London that he is going to test his machine, and sets off from his Victorian dining room to arrive in the same place in AD 802,701, now a beautiful pastoral land, inhabited by a peaceful, vegetarian and gentle (to the point of apathy) humanoid species called the Eloi. But all is not as idyllic as it first seems – below the ground live the Morlocks, whose life is spent in darkness, and who live off of Eloi flesh…

This is a show aimed at young audiences, so the horror of the Morlocks is softened by their portrayal as rather comic big-headed, red-eyed creatures. And there are other changes: the gentle waif-like Weena, an Eloi girl that The Time Traveller rescues from drowning and befriends, is far more feisty and funny than Wells’ original.

Adapting a novel, even a short one like The Time Machine, into a dramatic script inevitably means that some things are left out or compressed. Here, the ending of the story feels very rushed – although I do very much appreciate the giant butterfly that appears in what is now 30 million years in the future, picking up on a butterfly motif introduced earlier. There are a few moments when the script plays above the heads of  the intended young audience to amuse the parents, and these nudge-nudge wink-wink moments I find uncomfortable. But I do very much enjoy the references to London in the 1890s that add some context to the story, and suggest possible reasons for the future split in mankind: the legacy of industrial Britain with its dark mines and sweatshops; the construction of the London Underground, with its heavy cost to construction workers’ health.

There is also a solid political message brought forth from Wells’ story and relayed to this young audience: it is inevitable that inequalities and the progress of elitism will result in more and more divides in society – and perhaps if we carry on the way we are going, we will end up split into Eloi and Morlock tribes! Many of these ideas are further explored in the very lovely The Time Machine Times that is given out at the show, the work of poet and wordsmith Elspeth Murray.

A word of praise too for the venue: attending shows at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, a year-round venue dedicated to supporting Scottish writers, artists and theatre-makers, is always a pleasure.

She no longer wants to talk about getting stripped; she now wants to talk about getting dressed. She sits behind a sewing machine, her lit face rapt in concentration, her beautiful pre-Raphaelite auburn curls falling forward. The machine judders along. ‘Wearing clothes I have made is the most honest way I have of being in the world.’

Lydia Higginson is a dress designer. She used to be a costume designer, and once made three ultra-theatrical outfits for her three best friends – a cheery clown suit for Josie, a feisty flapper outfit for Olivia, and a pretty pink prom-queen number for Nobahar. They were outfits for a show never made – except now the four school friends are back together making the show.

But it’s a different show to what might have been. Not long after making those costumes, when she was just 19 and travelling overseas on her gap year, Lydia was stripped, beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang of ten men who broke into the house she was staying in. We learn that when Lydia returned home to the UK, she vowed to replace every item in her wardrobe with something new she’d made for herself. This literal re-dressing became her healing tool.

She later approached her old school friend Josie Dale-Jones, an emerging theatre-maker and founder of ThisEgg, to ask if she might want to make a show about ‘the robbery’ (which is how Lydia refers to the attack). The process of decision-making finds its way into the final show: Will I be seen as attention-grabbing, asks Lydia. Do I want my life on display in this way? She is cool and calm in her re-telling of the horrible facts of the assault – this low-key delivery far more affecting than any emotive ‘acting’ might be.

Having decided she would take up the challenge, Josie persuaded Lydia to be in it, and from there it soon become obvious that dancer Liv (Olivia Norris) and singer Nobahar (Mahdavi) ought to be too.

Those original fantastical costumes become both a vehicle for exploring the archetypal characters that might have been in that non-existent show, and an ironic commentary on lost innocence. They are Showgirls – the name of a song sung by Nobahar, one of her own compositions. Choreography for the show is by Olivia, and of course costumes by Lydia.

But there are other clothes here too. Black dance outfits peeled back to reveal naked backs – spines – that offer support to each other. At one point, there’s a heap of clothes lying on the floor, Lydia lying in them like a quivering bird in a nest, as Nobahar sings to her gently. And one by one, all four don beautiful wild-silk dresses – teal and old-gold and rust and blue-grey – in which the girls take on the mantel of grown women, strong and proud in their very different feminine identities, happily dancing in a line, echoing the opening image of the four giving us their schoolgirl dance class routine.

This is an extraordinarily skilled piece of theatre from such a young company. Yes, ThisEgg’s founder/director Josie is the daughter of Hoipolloi’s Dale Shon-Jones and Stefanie Mueller – and Mueller is credited with stage design for the show, so we could argue that not only is theatre in her blood, she has had a strong helping hand too. But that is by-the-by – a case of just making use of what you have available, as anyone would. And no amount of parental support can grant you talent. This show has been created and realised by these four young women, they own it, and it bears the mark not only of their united talents in theatre-making, dance, music and costume design, but also the real-life love for each other that is at the heart of the work.

For anyone who saw and loved the feel-good romps Cantina or Scotch & Soda, or the clever homage to circus tradition She Would Walk the Sky, the news that the creator of these shows, Company 2, were now making a piece inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground might be received with alarm. But fear not, Sediment is a beautiful and accessible piece of circus-theatre, reprising many favourite motifs from the company’s previous work, including breathtaking hand-to-hand routines, angsty battle-of-the-sexes apache-dance encounters, and even the old favourite bottle-walking act…

The show is more a ‘response to’ than a ‘version of’ Dostoevsky’s novella. Notes from the Underground is only really there as a catalyst, a bringer of ideas to the table – ideas that include the notion of the unreliable narrator; the plight of modern man (and here I do mean ‘man’ not ‘human’) perplexed by the ways of the world; the obsession with – and the fear of – the desired encounter with the object of desire; the constant torment of imagination and memory intruding upon the present moment.

Here’s how this plays out in Sediment…

The immensely talented David Carberry is ‘the man’. We first meet him wriggling and twitching and flinching in a chair centre-stage. To his left, an old upright piano, to his right a vintage TV set, the screen displaying fizzing black-and-white lines and a white-noise hum.

Behind a gauze screen, the desirable ‘other’ (Alice Muntz) is seen in silhouette, a Lottie Reiniger cut-out in layered lace petticoat and camisole, slowly twirling her hoop. As the two come together for the first of many beautiful duets, she continues to hoop as he does all he can to break into her circle. He fails, but manages to lift her by one foot, as she continues to hoop without even a moment’s pause with hardly any acknowledgement of his presence, other than occasionally swatting him away as if he were an annoying fly. Such skilled choreography!  It’s gorgeously low-key in tone, whilst being simultaneously immensely highly skilled, something of a trait of this show. Choreography is credited to Chelsea McGuffin, who with Carberry is co-director of Company 2. – Carberry gets a director credit, with Muntz listed as co-performer and co-creator, so we’ll just applaud everything on show in Sediment as a wonderful joint effort.

Now she’s tearing sheets of paper – poems or letters, perhaps even Dostoevsky’s own writing – and with each rip, his body responds as if it is itself being torn. As their relationship develops – although always with a push-and-pull, they never fully acquiesce to each other – we are treated to some of most fluid and sensuous dance-circus duets you’re likely to see.

And sound, used so cleverly to drive the dramaturgy of the show. Recorded: the hiss of the TV, the crackles of an old record player, the soft notes of vintage jazz, an old Music Hall classic, a cowgirl waltz. Live: the clatter of a typewriter, a strummed guitar and prepared piano (him), a zither (her). And a minimal amount of spoken text, used for its rhythm and musicality: ‘You wrote…’ ’You wrote me a letter… ‘ ‘You wrote me a letter and I… ‘ ’You wrote me a letter and I keep it in a box beside my bed.’ Delivered by her as he continuously pulls the microphone from her.

We never know quite where we are – the past, the present, inside his head? – but rather than this being confusing, it creates a dream-like, layered and nuanced stage world in which memory and imagination are as real as anything else. And the inanimate objects in this world – the musical instruments, typewriters, papers, bottles, hoop, trapeze – exist as things with magical, fetishistic qualities to be fought over for possession. Often, the two communicate to each other via the objects rather than in a clear and direct physical relationship. Existential angst and melancholic pathos permeate every scene, although often teamed with wry humour.

As for the circus turns: there is a great deal of pure unadulterated top-notch circus skill on display – including some of the best hand-to-hand work currently on show at the Fringe or indeed anywhere else – and there is also much usurping of expectations. A Saw the Lady in Half act which starts with the lady sawing herself in half, and ends – well, let’s just say in an unexpected manner. A solo trapeze number from Carberry in which he appears to fall, to land in stillness in a toe-hang, just inches from the ground, looking all the world like a hanged man, and enters into a kind of battle with the trapeze, ducking under and over it; and an absolutely gorgeous soft-shoe shuffle inspired ‘rubber legs’ sand dance, also Carberry.

Although both he and Alice Muntz are brilliant, it is David Carberry’s show – he had the original idea, and Sediment is in many ways a showcase for his phenomenal talents as a contemporary circus performer. It is a great achievement, very different in atmosphere (if not in skills) to the company’s  previous work – a truly surprising and inspiring circus-theatre show.

‘It seems that we may stop here.’