A world within a suitcase – tall town houses, a tram, and little paper-cut people happily going about their business. A mother and daughter holding hands. A group of adults waiting at a stop. Children sitting on the pavement. A man taking a stroll. Everyday life. The female performer manipulating the little people provides an underscore of  small murmurings in French, and a vintage jazz tune plays in the background. The music stops. A pair of giant hands clad in black leather gloves descends on the scene, snatching up the little people carelessly, counting them as they are thrown into a truck. Who knows where they are going.

But of course we know. We know too well. It’s a story we all know, and a story that has to be told, again and again, lest we forget.

Only One Suitcase Allowed opened at the London International Mime Festival on Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January, a date that marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. It is inspired by the story of Anne Frank, but it is also the story of the many millions – millions, it is still almost impossible to compute what happened, here in Europe, just one generation ago – millions of people who were taken, hounded, hunted, transported, murdered by Hitler’s fascist regime. Jewish people, gay people, Roma people. Anyone who was seen as an ‘undesirable’.

The show takes its title from the many documented stories that state that when people were rounded up to be taken to the camps, they were told they could take only one suitcase. They fearfully, but perhaps hopefully, packed – what? What would you take? Your mother’s jewellery? Your best dress and shoes? Photographs of your children? Or perhaps something more practical? Of course, these suitcases were taken off them at the door of the camp – their valuables stolen from the victims along with their lives. The suitcases can still be seen today at the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.

So suitcases are the central metaphor of the show – the objects that form the scenography of the piece and its core dramaturgical device. A great pile of suitcases confront us, accusingly. Inside the suitcases, there are many tiny worlds – mostly viewed through little peephole lenses. These worlds are beautifully crafted, showing us interiors that become ever more restricted and oppressive. A comfortable living room, a small hidden room behind a bookshelf, doors that open to show other doors that open, a dark van interior, a discarded teddy bear…

It is a straightforward story, and there are no surprises in the narrative – much as we would like it to end differently – although how the story is told is novel. The design is exquisite, and would appeal strongly to anyone interested in Toy Theatre, paper cuts, or peepshow booths. Attention to detail is admirable. The tiny suitcase worlds are the perfect metaphor for the ever-diminishing worlds of the victims, trapped like dolls in a dolls house, always under surveillance. The performance is strong and sound – we are guided efficiently and lovingly through this carefully crafted landscape.

Another important aspect is who is choosing to tell this tale. Nordic Puppet Ambassadors are director Outi Sippola and performer Linda Lemmetty (the two also co-designed the show). They are Finnish, and say in their programme notes that although some people in other countries might feel that they have Holocaust fatigue, their generation in the Nordic countries feel far removed from these horrific events, and thus the creation of the show involved extensive research, including a visit to the camps.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it, said George Santayana. One cynical response to that is that history repeats itself because no one was listening the first time. It is our duty to listen, to look and to listen. To remember, and to stay alert.

We are grateful, therefore, that these young artists have seen fit to investigate this story, and to present it to us with fresh eyes. It is just 15 minutes long, a one-on-one, and it is both beautiful and heartbreaking.

Marée basse – low tide. Downtime. The waiting time.

On stage, there’s a house, or at least, a kind of shack. Inside its wooden boundaries, a kitchen table, a couple of chairs, a small enamel cooker, tin pots and pans, a TV.  As we enter the auditorium, a nasty waspish synth line repeats and repeats ad nauseum. We sit down. We wait.

A stubbly bald man in a brown shirt and overcoat shuffles on, sits – or tries to, ending up painfully (for us if not for him) tangled up with the chair. Another man comes on, bulkier, fully bearded. He trips over the edge of the flooring, gets into a flap trying to locate an invisible hook for his coat, ends up sitting next to the other man. They sit, they wait, they pass the time, time passes. Who are what are they waiting for? Godot only knows.

It’s dinner time – kind of. There is a slow paring of an apple, a few slugs of wine, a rattled pot. Things turn freaky as knives are thrown. A great scary cleaver is stuck into the table. There is some rather clever business – Lazzi tricks and turns – as men and table and chairs and knives and metal mugs are thrown or balanced or juggled in unconventional ways. It is all about the game between these two, and we are observers but not recognised as present. There is no music, and no spoken text – just some grunts, and bangs, and popping corks. And most unnervingly, the sound of that meat cleaver as it connects to a great many different surfaces.  I find myself shifting a little uneasily in my seat.

Just as I’m starting to feel a little bored – bang! The tussle intensifies and the thinner man ends up falling through the back curtain and off the wooden flooring of the shack, immediately alerting us to the fact that this is a theatrical setting. I wake up a little more, interested. He reappears in the auditorium – heralding the start of a new dimension to the piece. Now we are acknowledged, and played to. Two red waistcoats are brought out (inevitably, the big man’s waistcoat is too small for him). They stand outside the perimeter of their shack, fully downstage, and show us their acrobalance act – old-timers who are trying to relieve the glory days in vaudeville. The TV is switched back on to provide an unsuitably grandiose soundtrack. They are seeking our approval with ‘ta da’ endings and desperate puppy-dog eyes. The turning on and off of the TV – the blank blue screen, the white ‘snow’, sound or no sound – is a key element to the show, acting as a kind of scene-setter or marker. Eventually, they watch the TV and ignore us, other than for an occasional glance over the shoulder…

The clowning skill of the deviser-performers (Benjamin de Matteis and Mickael Le Guen) is beyond question – they trained at the Lido Circus School in Toulouse and the show bears the mark of that heritage. That Le Guen was, as a youth, an award-winning apprentice chef is no doubt a factor in the subject matter and setting of the show.

Marée Basse is a show that I enjoy rather than absolutely love. I feel a little unsure when watching it, rather unsettled, but appreciate it more and more afterwards, as I remember a small detail cleverly played – particularly the extraordinarily nerve-racking knife throwing and object balancing scenes – or muse on the relationship to the audience and to the performance space that is explored and acted out here. I believe it was originally devised for and performed in a tent, and I have the feeling that I would have enjoyed it more in this setting. From my seat on the end of an aisle a few rows back, I felt a little detached from the stage action.

Not my favourite ever clown show, but a good and interesting show by a pair of very talented performers.

 Featured image (top) by Vincent d’Eaubonne

An elaborate construction of scaffolding and timber, an open-fronted house, sits on a high stage in the centre of the performance space. Lights dim, other low-lights glow. The house seems to have a life of its own, flickering and humming. A man – dark tousled hair, black jacket, white shirt – comes in, makes himself at home. He turns off some lights, turns on others, shakes a cloth out of a ‘window’, turns on the radio. French voices burble, the sound quality of an old-school transistor radio, slightly incoherent yet filling the space. The man’s shoes clatter on the wooden floor as he walks the length of his house and back again. He sits slumped in a chair with his back to us in the dim light, silhouetted. This low-key scene setting the mood of the piece is long, but we stay engaged. We know something is about to happen. Tension builds.

The change comes as the man opens up a trapdoor and disappears below the floor, and at that exact moment his doppelgänger bursts from a door high up on the wooden wall stage-left, careering down and bouncing up again to disappear back through the door. So yes, the floor is a trampoline. Well, this is a Mathurin Bolze show, so it would be, wouldn’t it?

The man and his shadow (or is it the shadow and his man?) are then engaged in a game of hide-and-seek or call-and-response. There are many ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ moments. One appears, the other disappears – through the trapdoor, or through one of the many doors and windows built into the set. One stands by the back wall window, and we see his shadow outside. As Man One (or is it Man Two?) moves, and his shadow remains outside, we do a little double-take, our brains tricked even though we now know that there are two performers. Each in turn flies through the air, bouncing off the trampoline floor to take up a different vantage point on the set. As they move through the space, jackets go off and on seamlessly. We lose track of who is man and who is shadow.

The two men move into a different game. Now they are brothers, twins. They fall onto the trampoline in tandem, their moves synchronised perfectly. Now there’s another shift. One is shirtless, limp, lifelessly slumped, then cradled in the arms of the other, a Pieta moment. It turns nasty as the shadow is bundled away through the trapdoor. In one of the most beautiful images in the show, we see a figure trapped underneath the trampoline, struggling to escape – seen as a body shape pushing against the resistant fabric, then seen as a black shadow, legs flexed like a frog, as an intense light trained onto the trampoline transforms the image.

And so it plays out – the man and his shadow, the shadow and his man, sometimes rivals, sometimes brothers, but always two parts of one whole. Hans Christian Anderson’s eery story The Shadow – in which a man’s shadow replaces him in his life – seems to be an obvious point of reference, although not cited as such in the programme notes, which mention Dostoevsky’s The Double (which was published around the same time as Andersen’s tale – something obviously in the air in 1846) and Edgar Allan Poe. We are also told in those notes that Barons Perchés is a sequel to Mathurin Bolze’s seminal show Fenêtres, which was based on Italo Calvino’s novella The Baron in the Trees – a text which has inspired many circus-theatre creators over the years. Apparently, Bolze is now imagining his hero (a young nobleman who has decided to leave his family and live alone in the trees) split into a younger and older self. I didn’t see Fenêtres, but have to say that witnessing this sequel, I struggle with marrying up my knowledge of Calvino’s text with what I’m seeing onstage, although the doppelgänger, or shadow, or two-sided man motif is perfectly embodied. Let’s be clear – my quibble is not with the show itself, just with how it relates to the stated artistic inspiration. Best not to worry about such things, perhaps, and focus on what we see onstage!

And what we see is truly inspiring. The physical skill of both performers, Mathurin Bolze and Karim Messaoudi, is of the highest quality. Theirs is a delicious dance of bodies exploring every possibility of gravity, levity and resistance, using the trampoline, the set, and of course each other. In one minute they are hurtling on and off the trampoline at breathtaking speed, in another they are walking slowly along at ceiling height on top of the scaffolding, or poised in stillness like lizards on the open front wall, seen in silhouette.

The moodiness of the piece is broken up with the obligatory (in contemporary circus-theatre) loud and brightly-lit clowning moment – in this case, as the performers become a pair of rival birds, cockerels strutting and crowing. It feels a little like it is there to give the men a few minutes respite from the intense demands of trampolining rather than having any sound dramaturgical purpose, but we’ll allow them that!

The sceneography is beautiful – set design, lighting (which exploits the ‘shadow’ metaphor in every way it can) and the limited but effective use of video projection all working harmoniously to tell stories using pictures rather than words. And the sound design, by MPTA company member Jerome Fevre, is brilliant. How marvellous it is to see – and hear – a show in which sound, vision and physical action work so harmoniously together. The soundscape includes creaking cellos and melancholic piano lines mulched in with tweeting birds, chirping crickets, and the drone of the radio station. There is also live sound – a swanee whistle here, a dash of harmonica there – and the sound of the set itself features, as a clever mix of contact mics and one large ambient mic hanging from a light pendant pick up the bangs and thumps of bodies and objects hitting the trampoline or the scaffolding, turning the impact sounds into crashing cymbals or chiming bells. Throughout, the house feels to be as much of a character as the man and his shadow – but at this point in the show it really shouts its presence.

Barons Perchés is not a perfect show – there is the occasional slip in pace or tone, and I’m left with a few dramaturgical conundrums that bother me, such as: Why does the house appear to be moving through the landscape? Why are the men now wearing brightly coloured sports clothes? It is conceived, directed and performed by Bolze and could perhaps have benefitted from an outside director. Nevertheless, an excellent show. A marvellous merging of sound and vision, fantastic physical performance, and a thoughtful exploration of the ever-appealing doppelgänger theme.

Photo: Christophe Raynaud de Lage