Theatre has some pretty bloody antecedents and these are the subject (and lurking subtext) of interactive Brighton-based company FoulPlay’s latest puppet-centric feast for Brighton Fringe.
We begin in an auction room where the bids (ours), for a host of relics from a certain Elizabethan entertainment establishment, are coming thick and fast. In 2014 the company won the Fringe’s Best Outdoor Event for their Roald Dahl-homage race around the city centre, The Fantastic Fox Hunt, and the ghost of outdoor languages can still be felt here. Smart crowd management strategies draw us into the world of the play and make it look easy to oversee our extensive interaction with it.
The world has been lovingly crafted, from the handmade artefacts that the auctioneer touts which include original artwork and homespun lace collars, down to the homemade and specially designed currency we can pay, and play, with. This is a company of artists and their influence – in the costumes, puppets and detailed design – can be felt throughout.
The heart of the play, though, comes when we move out of the auction room and into the past it so reveres. Jack Stigner’s long monologue of a showman defining the nature of his sport to his innocent yet curious daughter is a really densely worked and enjoyable piece of writing. It ambitiously takes on a Renaissance tone (complete with Shakespearian homilies) and rises to the challenge while feeding us a lot of both history and character. Stigner’s performance as the hinge between the two worlds is precise and convincing: his transformation from gormless no-mark to wily hustler boldly drawn in the simplest of sequences with a smart use of sound. Ulysses Black’s hilariously emollient auctioneer has a nice streak of repressed violence. Elsewhere, a somewhat underused Annie Brooks illustrates the lots with appropriate and sometimes less appropriate imagery on her OHP.
The show definitely leaves us wanting more: it is highly wrought but remains on the slight side. The puppets, when they come, are brilliantly grotesque, but some of their theatrical possibilities are ‘sacrificed’ to interactivity, only to be fully experienced by a few audience members. There’s a flaw too, in the central premise, as our natural urge remains in support of the bear not the violence whose emotional continuity with theatre the company are touting. As such, there are some limits to the extent we can get carried away in the action, despite the company’s thoughtfulness in their offers to us on this front. The connection between the two halves could be more worked – I wanted something to bring us back to the twenty-first century at the end.
The production is ultimately a love-letter to theatre itself. Though not without its flaws, as the past and present of the form collide we can glimpse traces of what made and makes the live experience so exhilarating.