Invisible Thread: Les Hommes Vides

Invisible Thread: Les Hommes Vides

Invisible Thread: Les Hommes Vides

The empty men are thick, greyish-white, heavy creatures with googling eyes and lead in their feet, which land heavily on the table-top stage. Their expressions manage to be both gaunt and gormless. They are vaudeville creatures, nearly beheading one another with that old classic, the too-fast-turning plank. They are almost unable to take to their stage – the table itself proving too ambitious a clamber. This styling re-contextualises the ever-failing puppets of Liz Walker’s repertoire (both with Invisible Thread and her previous company Faulty Optic) in the genre of slapstick silent movie, complete with jaunty soundtrack. Here they are workaday everymen and their ineptitude and simplicity are our own.

Their story however is only one part of this production, which moves into interactive shopping with Dam Busters themed music and an Ozymandias-like consumer Wasteland (with Ozymandias as a coldly fratricidal baby monster). What links these scenes is some rather bleak poetry, intoned with Dylan Thomas resonance, that gradually links our sense of these endearing, frightening empty men to ourselves. Emptied out by the deferral of desire to shopping they are vulnerable to all we project onto them.

There’s nothing slight about this twenty-minute performance, which, despite its size, cycles us through a dizzying range of emotions, including a profound and brilliantly unsettling questioning about our relationship to the world. There are some aspects however which do feel that they’d merit further development. The presence of the puppeteers, greeting us with raffle tickets at the start of the show, feels uncertain and unclear and as the darker satire of the piece grows stronger I felt the lack of a clearer sense of their relationship to one another, to us, or to their puppets. It’s great to see Walker experimenting with text, which worked best when it set up intriguing tension with the imagery and action, opening up the scale and contrast of the piece. Yet text can be an unwieldy ingredient in visual theatre and sometimes the effect of its incessant questioning (‘Who are these objects? Why are they here?’) was to make me wish the piece trusted its material world to suggest more of the answers.

www.invisiblethread.co.uk

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About Beccy Smith

Beccy Smith is a freelance dramaturg who specialises in developing visual performance and theatre for young people, including through her own company TouchedTheatre. She is passionate about developing quality writing on and for new performance. Beccy has worked for Total Theatre Magazine as a writer, critic and editor for the past five years. She is always keen to hear from new writers interested in developing their writing on contemporary theatre forms.