How perfectly the heart works, when it works…

Poker Night Blues is a collaboration between  the US-based theatre company Theatre Movement Bazaar and Chinese-based Beijing TinHouse Productions. Together, they take an iconic American dramatic text, A Streetcar Named Desire, and deliver it to us with an ensemble of Chinese actor-dancers (although some are possibly Chinese-American) using a brilliant and extraordinary mix of forms of physical performance that include Chinese Bamboo Pole Dancing; American Jazz, Charleston and a dash of Tango ensemble physical theatre; acrobatics; stylised fights; and a kind of heightened hyper-realist acting style that I take (without really knowing) to be coming from Chinese performance traditions. There’s also a dash of crooning, in English: ‘I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own than a fickle real-life girl’. And a lot of card playing.

How well the mind works, when it works…

Tennessee Williams’ iconic text is deconstructed, reduced to its essence, and reassembled – with some sections repeated at different points throughout the show: ‘Stella, we have to get you out of here, you’re a Dubois’, comes round a few times. It’s in Mandarin (with English supertitles), and it bears the mark of a very interesting cross-cultural fertilisation. I’m particularly fascinated by the characterisation of the two sisters at the heart of the story – Blanche and Stella Dubois – with gestures and movements that incorporate and move between very different American and Chinese portrayals of womanhood explored in the play. Like any homage to, or deconstruction of, it adds to the appreciation if you know the original text – but this would also stand up as a piece without that pre-knowledge, as the reduced narrative is delivered very clearly, through words, physicality and gorgeous visual imagery. There is a very lovely scene where Blanche reminisces about her past whilst Stella’s ultra-butch husband Stanley pulls frocks out of her suitcase and holds them up in front of his body, creating a very lovely challenge to his self-image as a macho man.

I leave the theatre feeling that I know Tennessee Williams’ play a little better – particularly enjoying the investigation of gender stereotypes (Eastern and Western) in this production. But I also feel that I’ve been in the hands of a creative team who are in control of their material, and not afraid to use the mores of popular culture in the telling of their tale.

An upbeat, entertaining and thoughtful production for heart and mind.

We start with a man sitting at a desk and a speech from Shakespeare – Henry V to be precise. Inventor of the parchment passport in 1440, it would seem. This leads into a breathless dash through the history of the passport. Twentieth century innovations include the 1920 League of Nations standardisation, with 32 pages allocated for visas and entry and exit stamps, the allocation of French as the official passport language,  perforated numbers in the 1960s, then bar codes in the 1980s, and finally to the electronic passport.

Thaddeus Phillips is an engaging storyteller, and just hearing him speak is enthralling, as we are taken on a breathtaking, juddering journey around the world in 80 minutes as we rattle through the 17 border crossings of the title. He tells his tales in many spoken languages – he speaks, or can do a good impersonation of speaking, a whole swathe of tongues. But there is more: the piece is made with the eye of a scenographer, so it is no surprise to read in the programme notes that he is not only an actor/director, but also a thetare designer. He interacts with his set in many and various wondrous ways. It’s just a table and a chair, and a lighting rig bar decked with various lights pulled down to chest height – but suddenly we see the flashing wings of a jumbo jet, where a stowaway has hidden in the wheel hub; a train carriage crossing through the countries once known as Yugoslavia, with a motley crew of passengers and conductors vying for his space; or a high-tech armed-to-the-teeth Israeli border run by team of superwoman soldiers that becomes a Jordanian border run by an old man dozing in the corner of the room.

There’s plenty of humour, sometimes cheery and laugh-out-loud, sometimes dark and edgy. Croatia features a few times: there’s a really unnerving ferry journey from Italy to Croatia (‘a country so new that the ink on the document is still wet’), just our hero and a bunch of very drunk Bulgarian truck drivers; and later a ridiculous, Kafka-esque situation trying to enter Bali with a Croatian passport. The Indonesians haven’t actually heard of Croatia, and don’t have it on a list of approved countries.‘Look! You have Yugoslavia! It’s the same!’ doesn’t wash. This story is told with a very lovely nod towards Wayang Kulit, the table and chair tipped to the side creating a shadow theatre set, and a giant cockroach in the horribly hot detention room shown as an enormous shadow beast walking across the ceiling.

Most of the stories come from the past twenty years, and I’m assuming (although perhaps I shouldn’t) that at least some are autobiographical, from his own experiences of international travel. Also thrown into the mix are historical reflections – for example on meetings between Winston Churchill and TE Lawrence (aka Laurence of Arabia, cue theme tune). One of my favourite border crossings is a tale of a painstakingly difficult operation involving a tunnel between Egypt and Gaza used to smuggle in not arms, not medicine, but a bucket of KFC for the family.

Some of the stories are short and snappy, which works very well; and some are long and drawn out, which works well in some cases and not so well in others. A lengthy tale of Amazonian encounters with hallucinogenic substances is a bit too long-winded, for example. Some are threads that are weaved throughout the show – the most harrowing being the fate of the man who stowed away in the wing hub. We froze to death, and when the plane landed and the wheel hub opened, he dropped to the ground and was discovered on a street in Mortlake, West London.

Thaddeus Phillips is a dynamic and always engaging performer, and this is a show that manages to be funny and entertaining whilst simultaneously flagging up the absurdities of our border-obsessed, wall-building, visa-demanding, passport-stamping world.

17 Border Crossings is presented at Summerhall by Aurora Nova.

The centre of the stage is filled with soil. Three almost-naked bodies. It rains, they get wet, the soil turns to mud. They get very dirty, their bare skin and the skimpy bits of muslin cloth preserving their modesty (more or less) coated in mud. It’s a mess, a filthy bloody mess.

So that’s the first two minutes of Clout’s new show Feast, which explores our relationship to food.

And you can’t talk about food without talking about agriculture, human toil, the ethics of farming, our relationship to the natural world. Not that any of this discussion takes place using words, or in a reductive polemical way. Instead, we are fed a fabulous feast of visual imagery, which we gobble up with greedy delight.

Cast out from the garden of Eden, or emerging from the swamp, or risen from the plains of the African savannah (choose your own favourite creation myth), our newly-soiled human trio – one Adam and two Eves – walk in an endless circle around the stage, each with their their ankle tied to what looks like a tin bowls with a hole in the bottom, waving cutlery aloft. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Lisa. Then fix it, dear Henry. Necessity is the mother of invention, and it is time to be inventive, or you’ll starve. The tin bowls become hats. Hat bowls. This section of the show is called Breakfast, so of course there are cornflakes. Pouring down from on high; manna from the gods.

Lunch is served! Civilisation has arrived! At the rear of the stage is a table, bedecked in white linen. And black plastic bags, ripped open. Behold the feast within! Absurdly large napkins are tucked in, looking like backless nightdresses. On your marks, get set, go! It’s a medieval banquet. There are food duels enacted by jousting knights on prancing horses and there are courtly dances, and seduction. It’s a party, a wedding, a sumptuous orgy of food. But who is diner and who is dinner?

Ah yes, Dinner. Things get darker. Literally as the stage dims, now lit by the screen on the rear wall. And metaphorically. Food has become something else altogether. Something more and something less. Something that needs to be processed, manipulated. The linen and luscious spread go, the large table becomes three smaller ones. Live feed video focuses on the activities of each of the three performers at their stations. It’s like some sort of dystopian TV cookery show. There is raw, naked chicken. There is clingfilm. There are white latex gloves. There are close-ups on distended orifices (human and animal). My, what big teeth you have!

Feast takes us back to the glory days of 1970s Performance Art – and I mean that in the best possible way. On the day before I’d seen Clout’s show, I’d taken in the blood-and-guts of the Hermann Nitsch exhibition at Summerhall. Feast, in its very different way, seems to match Nitsch’s aim to ‘understand the context of dionysian in a more up-to-date way’. But it is also dark clown, and adroit physical theatre.

It’s a highly satisfying offering. The three-part structure offers us a snapshot of the human journey from gatherer to farmer to food industry processor. Within this structure, which gives a necessary framing to the subject matter, there’s a whole smorgasbord of ideas about our relationship with food. Underlying it all is the question of the link between our methods of feeding ourselves and our notions of civilisation.

The three actors onstage give vibrant, robust and entertaining performances. The sound design is excellent – the soundscape complements the physical action and visual tableaux beautifully, veering from djembe drumming to rumba to tango to the dark drone of industrial machinery. Lighting is similarly spot-on.

The only thing marring the show is nothing to do with Clout: the new upstairs space at Zoo has metal balustrades along the front of the seating. Really not good for sightlines for a piece of visual theatre. But this is the Fringe, and these things happen.

That aside, a marvellous experience. I left feeling fully feasted, happily digesting the delights I’d been fed.