Brighton Festival Associate Company Vincent Dance Theatre present two re-staged shows as part of the ongoing 21 Years/21 Works project documenting and celebrating their work since the company’s inception in 1984. Look at Me Now, Mummy was originally created in 2008; and Underworld in 2012. Audiences could choose whether to see them as two separate shows, or together in one programme.

Look At Me Now, Mummy is a solo performance set in a messy yet quite clinical looking kitchen. Up to her ears in domestic equipment; liquidiser, microwave/cooker etc, with hair pulled back into a tight bun, tired looking, yet remaining elegant and graceful, is something of a yummy mummy who bit by bit loses her ability to keep it all together. There’s lengths of polythene that waft in the breeze of an electric fan, beautiful music merges into radio static. This isolated woman is passing her time, experimenting with the bits and bobs that surround and entrap her. She plays at holding a baby that then gets shoved into the table top cooker. She’s discombobulated, between panicking and soothing herself and entertaining herself with roleplaying the part of a new mother, a role she hasn’t the script for. Candles are lit, balloons pop, paper is set alight and extinguished in a saucepan of water. I find her a bit tiresome, don’t care about her, the audience chuckles and appear riveted by her odd behaviour. Incidentally some mothers in the audience have real babes in arms, and are discreetly asked to leave when their babies become a little vocal! Our protagonist sings a strained version of Back to Black, and becomes increasingly distressed, flings about a chair and a saucepan, calms herself. She appears forsaken. A soul seeking redemption and comfort. In exhausted near derangement, she pisses on the floor and screams in simulated childbirth. At once very bare, and at the same time theatrical, I wasn’t that bothered about the character, yet the performance took a turn and I was surprised and appreciative by the end. With classical music now on the radio, the scene changes to something disturbing – on her back, legs akimbo, with a kitchen knife across her bare belly, swamped by the debris and detritus about her, she screams, and prepares for an auto caesarian, she screams more, as she drops the knife and rolls onto her side, her outcry transmutes into a newborn babies cry and she’s suddenly silenced, recollects herself, gathers together herself and the strewn about bunting. I’m left with a vivid visceral portrait of a new mum struggling to cope.

Underworld is an ensemble piece. Row upon row of church chairs. Shadows, as if in a nocturnal cathedral. The atmosphere and lighting is striking, cinematographic. Figures come in and out of light. Various pairings and perpetual partings. One man sobs, a woman screams. Looking skyward, they are contained in this all-encompassing ecclesiastical prison, and they themselves are containers of sorrows. They fold and unfold themselves. Hands in prayer. Hysterical laughing. Leaping over chairs, forming and reforming. They are patient, as composed as they can be. What vessels are these? Resigned to their relentless searching for place and peace. These straining souls bending and creasing their limbs, as if swimming and forever suspended in their sorrows and anticipation of an eternal pain, frantic reassembling of chairs. However much they attempt to shift their space, they are trapped. Frenetic scurrying, all chairs shifted and lifted into a pyre. The storm passes and clears. Games are played, rituals constructed to pass the time. Magnificently lit and energetically performed, an intensely physical ensemble theatre, Underworld, based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. is riveting for a while, a monochrome and athletically performed spectacle, yet after the first hour, I SO wanted the gloom to lift for some form of lighter reprieve. It was glorious in a Tarkovsky kind of way, yet became relentlessly beautifully gloomy. The audience shifted around a lot. Many left. At 2 hours and twenty minutes, with no interval or let up of this gloomy claustrophobic place, the audience was incredibly restless. I imagine that when the piece was originally created for the longest, darkest, filthiest of the dark arches under Leeds Railway Station in 2012, it would have worked superbly as a durational live performance for an unconventional space, but as a sit-down theatre work it felt relentless. Those bells! Even the beautifully composed soundscape got on my nerves. My companion told me that he had lost the will to live – sadly and frustratingly, we both felt like humans trapped and suspended in this theatre, desperate to move on and out to a breath of fresh air.