Review: Brilliant, Lyric Hammersmith Studio

Written for Culture Wars

Brilliant is to children’s theatre what Picasso and Pollock are to visual art. Dispensing with the usual rules of narrative, character and interaction, Fevered Sleep has created something altogether more responsive and gloriously freeform. It borders on live art; almost post-dramatic theatre for pre-schoolers. If that sounds overly highbrow, the work itself is not, since the shift in form registers neatly with its young audience, delighting the senses and sparking the synapses.

The final part of Fevered Sleep’s trilogy that delves beyond everyday routines to the magic therein, Brilliant hones in on bedtime or, more precisely, on the threshold between waking and dreaming. Having bid goodnight to the universe and all it contains, performer Laura Cubitt settles down to bed with her toy stag and slips into sleep. Behind curtains that open and close like heavy eyelids, Cubitt emerges into a dream-world of light that plays around the space.

What follows is almost a pas de deux between performer and light, whereby the interplay of performer’s body and intangible beams is fascinatingly otherworldly. Cubitt pops through luminous membranes into shady hollows and dances softly in radiant droplets in front of the glow of an enormous moon.

As the sturdiness of waking reality gives way to a dreamy fluidity, the scene’s logic blurs with it and Cubitt takes on elements of a bemused Alice in a shimmering Wonderland. As switches and mirrorballs plop from above, her dream becomes a causeway of cause and effect, each switch responsible for a stream of light, or a maze of reflection and refraction.

Yet all of this is temporary and fleeting, closed off and shut down by the curtains that draw her back into bed with a bump.

Director David Harradine displays a careful layering within the piece, which functions simultaneously as titillating light-show and physical poetry. With a soft score from double bassist David Leahy that captures the rippling fragility of the dream portrayed, Brilliant proves an aptly named exploration that drifts between dozy calm and ticklish dream.