This taut trio from Catalan company Man Drake is tightly wound around the central physical motif of the staccato repetition of simple human action. A woman sits reading, her gaze gliding back and forth across the pages of a newspaper. A man stands, his head turning back and forth, his shoulders briefly engaging in the […]

Beccy Smith explores mime as contemporary performance in the work of Gecko. In 2002 I stumbled into a Pay What You Can performance at BAC by a company I’d never heard of whose show had been picked up for a longer run after being spotted in a North London pub theatre. This early performance of Gecko’s […]

The act of remembering can be overwhelming, often not so much done by us as to us; triggered by a chance glimpse, the seemingly familiar. In Joyce’s novella, published as part of Dubliners, memory conveys potency, the remembered figure of a dead ex-lover holding a power over the present that those simply existing within it […]

One Step Before the Fall arrives at the London Mime Festival glittering with accolades from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It won the Herald Angel Award and was nominated for a Total Theatre Award for Physical/Visual Theatre. Inspired by Mohammad Ali’s battle with Parkinson’s the piece is a dense physical and musical exploration of the triumphs […]

A pair of old ghosts, lingering from a bygone era of music hall and vaudeville: Thibaud, ever ready to entertain, with masterful musical accompaniment from Leygnac, his wind-up music box. The pair are little and large, master and jester, magician and his assistant, playing a dynamic with a thousand possibilities. In a stream of perfectly […]