Ilotopie, Fous de Bassin (Water Fools)

Ilotopie: Fous de Bassin (Water Fools)

Ilotopie, Fous de Bassin (Water Fools)

Ilotopie are one of France’s best funded outdoor theatre companies, and over the last fifteen years they have been working on spectacles that take place on water.

Tonight they are in Salford, on Manchester Ship Canal. Their backdrop is the Lowry Centre, while on the other side, behind the audience, is the BBC’s new northern HQ towers.

The show starts off in a very low-key fashion. A Fiat Tipo drives along the surface of the water and suddenly breaks down, plumes of smoke bursting out of its bonnet. The driver gets out to inspect the damage and then sits and waits for assistance to arrive. As he does so a street cleaner with a wheelie-bin drifts by and someone cycles past. Streetlights emerge from the water. This is the sort of scenario that IOU used to do expertly.

The driver’s hair catches on fire and what was a reasonably rational narrative gets invaded by a variety of characters straight from a film like Fellini’s Satyricon. Someone rows a huge bed into view which collides with the car, causing the duvet to split and release feathers en masse. A naked king parades up and down a barge. Timed to exploit the fading of the daylight, the scene on the water now resembles one of those royal pageants that Handel wrote the Water Music for: the boats are lit by fire and there’s a noticeable increase in the use of pyrotechnics.

The technology is quite cunning. Performers can steer the boats and their floating platforms without appearing to use their hands – I’d imagine there’s some sort of foot control like those used in Segways. The pyrotechnics (of which there are a lot) are all fired from eight floating buoys. I’d love to have seen how they packed so many rockets and gerbs into such a small space.

The show was extremely charming and well-staged, but at times seemed a hairsbreadth away from It’s a Knockout!, especially in the use of a broad pantomime performing style. The transformation of the normal into the fantastical could have been much more developed – the form of the show makes it very interesting for an audience to watch so they could have let the beginning slow burn a bit longer. The most arresting image when you arrived was a tree growing out of the water, but apart from being a tether for the bed it wasn’t used. The image of a clown cycling along clutching a bunch of coloured balloons was, quite frankly, beyond the pale.