Pursued by a Bear: The Lamellar Project

The Lamellar Project have saved the world. Their genetic reconstructions of species subject to mysterious and ecologically catastrophic mass extinctions have rejuvenated failing food webs. Who’s to begrudge them the odd tweak here and there – to improve nature’s pattern where such improvements can now be identified? Yet of course, with modification comes commodification: ownership. And if you own nature then you haven’t just saved the world – you’ve taken control of it.

As science (fiction) this feels all-too-plausible: an account of the weaponisation of the genetics industry just a babystep from our contemporary experience. As theatre it feels less convincing. Played out through the deteriorating marriage of eco-activist Michael and his wife and Lamellar geneticist Carys, who performs via internet from Philadelphia and so appears on screen throughout, the conflict is deadened. The staging and storytelling is weighed down by this device – there are only so many ways you can watch a man interacting with a screen – and a glossy gauze cube, whilst brilliant for some snazzy digital projection, serves to reinforce the static nature of the dramaturgy.

The best sections are Ben Kalina’s short films, which intersect the ‘live’ scenes with poetic descriptions of the grim experiments in hybridization undertaken by the Lamellar Project. Their downstage focus and vivid, nightmarish descriptions bring Carys’s character more vividly to life than the rather wilfully un-self-knowing postures she is forced to assume throughout much of the marital drama, and the poetry in her accounts of the Caligarian creatures she has unleashed on the world is memorably disturbing, albeit unjustified by her characterisation.

There’s huge ambition and a raft of partnerships behind this project and many aspects – the design, the light, the digital work, the complexity of live streaming a performance – are realised to a high quality. Yet its technical ambition seems to have overshadowed thinking about dramatic essentials: character development, a script that varies in tone or shifts in rhythm and any sense of surprise are palpably lacking. From the moment the first scene unfolds it is clear where the story is going to end and the characters have to be written as well below any convincing intelligence for a pair of professional scientists not to see it too. It’s intriguing to see the ways live action can intersect with digital work in this way and the world it attempts to bring to life is nastily believable, but to make it interesting theatre the stagecraft needs such careful working too.

The Human Zoo: The Girl who Fell in Love with the Moon

Five actors in clownish makeup perform energetically in a highly theatrical mixture of exaggerated gestures and over-enunciation. They establish a premise that the troupe is travelling to Brighton to perform their (this) show. They stop off on the way to rehearse to an imaginary audience.

This second production from young collaborative company Human Zoo offers a series of cautionary tales, about individuals whose obsessions led to their tragic demise. It is highly reminiscent of Shockheaded Peter in style, yet with some of the story content brought up to date. There is a girl whose interest in the stars leads her on a quest for celebrity which ends with a psychedelic trip (I think). A man whose lust for internet information makes his head swell up into a balloon which carries him away, and the character of the title whose love for the moon… makes her seemingly disappear in a meteorite shower.

Clearly much time and attention has gone into making the show, which is also full of songs and smartly choreographed movement routines. There are moments of slapstick and puppetry alongside passages of quite dense poetic prose that suggest an ambition for philosophical profundity, which made me wonder what age range the piece is aimed at (it’s promoted ‘for all ages’).

Admittedly, I do suffer from an inverted snobbery, but the posh, squeaky accents and effervescent energy of adults seemingly playing children playing adults, felt mannered to me. However, the company are talented and industrious with a clear and well-realised vision of the style of work they want to make. Since they are dressed as clowns, more direct audience engagement might make us care more for the characters and invest in their stories. Near the end of the show one performer suggests that the tales are based on the fears and phobias of each performer, which added an extra layer of interest for me, and this intriguing idea would benefit from further elaboration.

The Rainbow Collectors and Karis Halsall: Hysterical

This is a fundamentally conventional play by performance poet Karis Halsall that veers off on surreal departures using puppetry and clown, as two of the characters experience hallucinations. A young woman applying for a job at an advertising agency is assisted in her pitch to sell bottled water by a talking baby doll. Her more clearly troubled ex-violinist brother descends further into some form of psychological affliction during which he is comforted by the Lion from the Wizard of Oz.

It wasn’t clear to me how these events related to each other, or if the show intended to provide a linking commentary on feminism, consumerism, and the vulnerability of contemporary masculinity. It may be that I missed some important points of information: the Main Space at the Warren suffers from significant noise pollution. The cast do use radio mics, but still this seemed a less than ideal venue for this kind of show. The most effective moments, for me, came when the clownish Madonna on roller skates engaged more directly with audience.

All the performers set about their roles with fervour, the set is well designed and the whole production has the look of ambition, but as the piece progressed I found myself increasingly lost by the meandering narrative. There is the promise of a tantalising twist which doesn’t quite materialise, and many of the characters seem rather clichéd. The cold-hearted ad agency posh boss and her bitchy, dolled-up underling seem derivative of various movie characters. There is a wacky mix of styles here attempting to address a serious subject, and it did generate some lively applause from sections of the house, but for me the sum of its parts didn’t add up to a coherent or engaging whole.

Shannon Yee: Reassembled, Slightly Askew

Reassembled, Slightly Askew describes Belfast-based artist Shannon Yee’s overwhelming personal journey in and out of surgery while hospitalised due to a brain infection. It continues through to rehabilitation and a realisation that the social and emotional self will be forever altered… slightly askew. The piece touches on the world around the patient, the medical professionals who care and treat her, and her steadfast relationship with her partner. It carefully portrays Yee’s wavering navigation through both the event and its consequences, and reaffirms a faith in human beings’ ability to heal.

The form of this piece makes it an immediate success. Handed a consent form by two performers dressed in medical uniforms, I am sat in a waiting room for my treatment, a hospital wristband is attached, and coats, bags, and identities are left behind. Audience members are led to their beds in a large, stark hospital room on the first floor of Battersea Arts Centre. I feel entirely in the hands of the two nurses in this cold empty environment. The transition into the intimate world that Shannon Yee has created is well facilitated by the nurses who balance their roles and their patients’ needs as nervous viewers in a way that reassures, enabling the audience to fully immerse themselves in a piece that calls for extreme vulnerability.

The rest of the piece seems simple, participants lie in their bed and listen to audio through a set of headphones. The complexity is in its construction which allows Yee to explore the geography of site and senses in altering, dislocating, and disorientating ways. Integral to this affect are the blindfolds we are given and the binaural technology used to create the work. Without sight, images are conjured up in the mind, evoked by a chaotic and multilayered soundscape. Our perceptions of space and of movement are altered and senses of feeling, hearing, and of movement are heightened. There is a science behind this swirling moving world of voices, medical machines, and fuzziness. Working with sonic artist Paul Stapleton, the piece uses two methods that make it innovative and fully immersive. Binaural recording techniques, which allow artists to situate sound recordings ‘in space’ around listeners’ heads, creates the illusion that we are in fact inside Yee’s mind, have taken her place, and hear her voice as it if it were our own. Speaking bodies also move and interact within the space around the listener whilst a technique called diffusion moves sound in and out around space also: it’s a strikingly full-body experience of sound as we lie, immobilised in our beds.

What this creates is theatre that is disorientating, unsettling and disquieting, as well as calming and comforting in the bedside manner of Yee’s partner and the blanket that tucks us in.

Complex emotional responses echoing Yee’s experiences are cleverly, thoughtfully generated. Our bed becomes the entire world: it is safe, yet often constricting like a prison and regularly invaded by noises both recognisable and alien. The relative safety and passivity of the patient generates a reluctance to re-enter the outside world and emphasises the trust that is given ultimately through powerlessness. There were four points that became almost unbearably panic-inducing, but safely dissipated, giving listeners a taster of their own fears and emotive responses.

The sound score feels disorientatingly physical: sensations of air popping and blowing around your head and footsteps in crunchy grass above you, invasive bee-like buzzing and the powerful sound of a baby crying are emotive sensations that open up personal narratives and interpretations. I was convinced throughout that people were moving about the room (though I was assured afterwards that this was not the case), that the bed shakes, and the end of it was knocked by someone – your sense of reality versus the constructed landscape of sound is truly shaken. The heightened vulnerability created here, means that tiny vibrations in the floor boards feel like waves: I was lost, a small falling stone in a deep ocean of sounds and imagined images.

Innovative in its method, and informative and educational in its outcomes, Reassembled, Slightly Askew intimately connects medical professionals with patients in terms of empathy as well as art to make sense of personal trauma. For audience participants who enter this theatrical induced coma, it feels like a ritual in which audiences pay homage to everyone who has suffered in similar ways. This generous production goes a long way to opening up a dialogue about the experience of serious illness that allows participants to begin to truly consider it whilst respecting its gravitas.

Ira Brand: Break Yourself

Jeepers creepers, where d’ya get those peepers? How they hypnotise…

Ira Brand’s latest show is all about looking. Looking at, through and beyond. Being looked at. And boy, are we looked at.

Having previously investigated health, ageing and fear, Ira, who is one third of producing company Forest Fringe (with Andy Field and Deborah Pearson) now turns her intense, intelligent gaze on identity and gender. It’s a great choice for the opening show of the Marlborough’s Queer Weekender, exploring female and male sexual desire in an hour of riveting, original theatre.

On stage, Ira, dressed Drag King style, preens her hair and sips her beer, then strolls louchely round the performance boundary marked in tape on the floor. She steps in, the music starts and launches into an expert lip-synching of Bruce Springsteen’s Fire before pulling up a chair to chat, in a cool Deborah Pearson-esque way, her tone level, legs wide, gaze strong. What she tells us is alarming: a sexual fantasy where the sex is ‘consensual, just.’ The man she screws in the underground carpark is the epitome of the self-possessed male, aware of his power as he looks around the bar, knowing he is being observed. For the men in the audience, there is an accusatory frisson here – are you that kind of man?

This sudden switch from entertainment to something far darker punctuates the work. Lights go up, there’s a song, lights go down, there’s a troubling encounter in an alley. Always the emphasis is on the eyes – she tries but fails to stare the teenager down – she shakes her head to suggest ‘no’ when she means yes. There is a terrifying build up of tension here, with language so vivid we can see the scene, feel the breath on her face.

We meet Ollie, a graphic designer. He is shy, diffident, he worships Springsteen – ‘those massive arms’ – and after a bit of banter with the audience, he breaks free to dance like a demon. We have heard the choreographic instructions in a voiceover; they sound strangely like moves a woman would make rather than Bruce. Ollie totally nails it, though in his soul he will always be dancing in the dark.

Break Yourself is an investigation of gender and desire, male power and masculinity, fan-dom and performance, that is both disconcerting and thrilling to watch. There are several modes of conduct at play, provided in part by the voiceovers, which serve as a way into the construction of Ira’s role. She is told to ‘gulp, not sip’; ‘don’t look so eager’ to convince as a man. She relishes her achievements: ‘you are exactly how I imagined you.’ The lighting marks the mood changes, reflecting off a wall of white squares. We are fully aware of the acting going on, and totally suckered by it. If this all sounds a bit heavy, it’s not without wit and a sly knowledge of its own ridiculous moments. The prevalence of the male gaze that dominates so much of our culture and society is skewered by the use of Bruce Springsteen, the good guy, as its symbol. A final, beautifully choreographed dance starts seated and ends in triumphant, electric guitar twanging, rock-god mode, upright, ‘big’ arms aloft, legs wide, to wild stadium applause.

Whoever is broken here, be it Ira, Ollie, Bruce, the dominant male, the questing female, or the audience’s expectations, it’s been a magnificent rupture.

Total Theatre