Review: Du Goudron et Des Plumes, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

At base, what else are we but self-conscious beings clinging onto a chunk of matter as it hurtles through space?

Theatre regularly reflects our own insignificance back at us, but it’s rare for a piece to zoom out as far and as successfully as this beautiful and rigorous circus piece from Compagnie MPTA and Mathurin Boize. Somehow Du Goudron et Des Plumes manages to make frankness oddly comforting, allowing us to share in mutual frailty and failure. It takes you by the hand, sits you down and whispers existential horrors in your ears, not to fright, but to reassure. In spite of the increasing chaos onstage, Du Goudron et Des Plumes is a soothing watch, almost hypnotic in its grace.

At last year's festival, Zimmermann & De Perrot placed a block-coloured circus on a pivoting, see-saw stage in Oper Opis. Compagnie MPTA take that far further with extrapolated returns, using a suspended square platform as their multi-functional apparatus. It’s like a Swiss Army stage: a robust piece of equipment that allows circus to be seamlessly integrated into action, to the extent that choreography disappears and conceit is subsumed. The focus is never on individual tricks, but the combinations of movement. Lines and diagonals, rhythms and tempos, parallels and oppositions blur together like a magic eye in motion.

It is, in no uncertain terms, mesmerising. You get caught up in the relational movement of both platform and performers. Sometimes they swing together, sometimes in opposition. In one spectacularly simple sequence, the cast plant their feet on the stage and stand still to give the impression of a world whizzing effortlessly around them.

In fact, impressions are everywhere. This is a show that sends your mind freewheeling with associations. The platform variously suggests a raft, a floating island, a drunken meteor, a stage in orbit and the earth itself. Ideas as complex and far-reaching as relativity and Plato’s cave pop into view like bursting bubbles.

Its best sequences come when it splits into above and below, echoing actions on two levels like the University Challenge split screen. One often thinks in terms of realms. Below is blanched with harsh white lights, an interrogation chamber, urban and cold; while above is dreamy and summery, rural and calm. At one point the whole appears a landscape reflected in a still pool, with figures hanging from their feet directly beneath their counterparts. I was reminded of Calvino’s City of the Dead, in which corpses are placed in an underground mausoleum to create a lifeless mirror of the living city above.

With its constant oppositions, peace and violence spun together, chaos and stability, Du Goudron et Des Plumes lulls and disturbs in equal measure. Humanity has rarely looked so small nor life so precarious and yet so worthwhile and impressive.

Photograph: Christophe Raynaud de Lage

Review: Hilum, ICA

Written for Culture Wars

To air one’s dirty laundry is, of course, to clean the skeletons from one’s closet, but washing machines and osteology have never been so intimately connected as in this petite amuse-bouche from French puppeteers Les Antliaclastes.

Taking its lead from the various stages of a washing machine cycle, Hilum creates an urban alternative to the woodland clearing. In a stained utility room, a collection of skeletal sprites set down their revels to the rhythms of a launderer, looming above them like a sacred temple: the pantry’s own Parthenon.

Tonally, Hilum is a nightmare in watercolours. Demonic figures, boney crabs and bats each with tiny humanoid skulls, are mollified by their cuteness. Even if the aesthetic is more impressive than the manipulation, Les Antliaclastes handle a very delicate balance throughout. It’s like a vision of Hell glimpsed in a saucer of milk.

There’s a great deal of fun to be had in spotting the segments of the cycle: the rush of the speed whir becomes a celebration of mischief; the flood, an underwater rock ‘n’ roll jive. Most piquant of all, is the final juddering drainage as transformed into the strains of labour, until finally, a miniature washing machine pops out, covered in soapy amniotic fluid, and spins a teensy whites wash.

Arguably, Hilum taps into the child’s fear of a violent domestic presence. Just as you think it's over, in a lull of calm that brings fairytale creatures and greenery, the drying process begins and the darkness returns. A skeletal figure, now life-size, stares out at us unnervingly; the petals round its head are parched. This process, no matter how daisy-fresh the conditioner, is not a natural one.

Truth be told, however, it is a spiral with next to no real-world urgency. Nonetheless, Les Antliaclastes have created a beautiful diversion laced with dark mischief. Washing day will never be quite the same again.

Review: Sans Objet, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Place any mechanized object on the stage and you immediately beg questions about the nature of performance. That Sans Objet, which either stars or centres on a vast, industrial robotic arm, isn’t overwhelmed by ontology is credit to the sheer virtuosity of Aurélien Bory’s composition. His choreography, both of man and machine, offers a 360˚ interrogation of technology, combining the ridiculous and the sublime such that it’s never less than dazzling.

The tendency, of course, is to anthropomorphize the machine and Bory encourages that by initially covering it with an expanse of black plastic. Underneath something indiscernible stirs, the plastic crackling like melting ice. Without its constituent parts, the machine is a bitumen-like mass morphing between shapes: here, a preying mantis; there is lizard or dinosaur. Momentarily it seems human, as if peacefully cycling through sun salutations.

When its finally uncloaked, it looks like the clenched fist of a bionic arm: staunch and muscular and, despite being a product of the 1970’s, futuristic.

Two men in black suits circle it, like Pinteresque strangers, and suddenly the machine becomes timid and vulnerable: an animal backed into a corner. Over the next hour, the relationship changes again and again. In friendlier sections, the pair tend to it like horse whispers and play with it like tourists swimming with dolphins. Elsewhere, it seizes control and lashes out, sometimes tossing them around the space like playthings or breaking up the stage beneath their feet.

What gives Sans Objet (literally, Without Purpose) its sheer beauty is that, contrary to our instinct to anthropomorphize, it is so categorically not human. Its movements are mathematical: the lines it cranes across are perfectly straight; its precision is pinpoint. Its presence makes the stage a three-dimensional grid of points to be plotted. At moments within, it operates with the delicacy of a surgeon and the more exact the machine, the shoddier we seem in relation.

More striking than that, though, is its power. It’s rare to see a force capable of actually threatening humanity on stage. The worlds created are fragile anyway and everything onstage is under human control. True, the robot is too. Its operator’s legs and remote control are visible at all times, but it is easy to forget and attribute it autonomy or imagine control being lost. San Objet might just be theatre’s Terminator moment. It plucks the cast into the air like toys in a perfect arcade machine, before lifting huge chunks of the stage and standing them vertically. But it does so entirely without strain or effort, a factor we expect of the most human of art forms.

Bory is clever enough to turn this threat on us, not just by association, but also in the present moment. When the machine turns its gaze our way, one wonders, perhaps only for a second, whether it might rip up its roots and run amok in the auditorium before rampaging down the South Bank. The final coup de theatre, in which the black tarpaulin is hung in front of the stage and beaten like metal being hammered into shape, is genuinely terrifying. The first amplified blast, a stomach-shaking boom, has the audience jolt as one. (My notebook, at this point, just reads: “Fuck Me.” An annotated heart-palpitation.)

But contradiction is everything in Bory’s composition and, here, wit sits next to horror. At times, the robot becomes the mime artist’s cheat: moving walls to stretch the old elongated limb routine into new territory. Bory spoofs classical mime or, perhaps, lovingly zaps it into the future. The performers, Oliviers Alenda and Boyer, clown perfectly and understatedly, exchanging blank looks of confusion. Again the clown finds his natural habitat: expressing the fallibility and feebleness, the fit-for-purposeless of mankind.

Here, Bory makes us wonder if there might be superior possibilities: a daunting proposition that extends our futility into disposability. You leave as astonished as you are aghast. Absolutely world-class.

Review: Gobo. Digital Glossary, ICA Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Rehearsal room philosophizing can be tricky. With the shared language and history of a process, particularly with devised work, it’s easy for a company to leave their audience utterly perplexed by slippery abstract concepts. Gobo is such an idea and, after an hour of watching Akhe’s odd elucidation of it, I’m none the wiser as to what it might mean to assert, as they finally do, “Everything is Gobo.”

Nonetheless, there’s a great deal of pleasure in the bafflement concocted by these two clowns as they conduct a series of bizarre experiments. Just as Stuart Sherman does with language, Akhe undermine the accepted order of things. Using a selection of Rube-Goldberg devices, they jumble the world’s relationships – of association, causality and purpose – like a lotto-machine, leaving the impression that you’re watching another of Alivin Platinga’s infinite possible worlds. After a while, there’s no questioning the wisdom of a vacuum-cum-shredder that sucks up, chews up and spits paper skywards. Worryingly, you wonder whether it might even make sense.

The pair seem like two rogue toymakers in an underground layer. Pointing cameras at each other like guns, it’s as if they’re broadcasting demands the outside world. That each routine is framed in relation to heroism, a position necessarily outside the norm, suggests they are holding the world hostage by opting out. It’s pointed, for example, that having impaled a book on a bed of nails, they saw through its pages. Why, they demand, must we make a ruler of rationality? Everything is up for grabs. Nothing need be as we suppose and accept. Everything is also that which it is not. Everything, in other words, is Gobo.

Utterly bizarre, then, and almost entirely mystifying, but also strangely compelling and, perhaps even, oddly necessary, Akhe’s piece makes possibilities seem possible.

Review: Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Productivity must be rather difficult when your place of work is a metaphor, so spare a thought of the two pen-pushing clowns stuck in an office at the end of human civilisation in Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl.

Geoff Sobelle and Charlotte Ford play the last two employees of Convenience Foods, left with little to do as the company (quite literally) collapses around them. Into the resultant cracks creeps the natural world: shrubs spring from filing cabinets, vines climb the walls and wild animals run, um, wild.

In the middle of this menagerie, Sobelle and Ford try – and often fail – to co-exist. She, all a gangle, desperately seeks his affirmation. He, obsessive-compulsive and increasingly sociopathic, is best left to his own devices. From their niggling battles grows something more primal: simultaneously a fight for territorial control and a mating ritual that winds up in a rhythmically rocking dumpster.

Sobelle and Ford are dextrous and daft performers and there’s a well-honed chemistry between them. Their unseen glares across the room, alternating between annoyance and longing, are delightful. They’re helped by a chalk-and-cheese opposition that ensures satisfying personality clashes. As Ford silently savours her Wotsits, stripping each of flavour with her tongue, a distracted Sobelle moves from a huffing rage to a quiet envy.

You’re always aware, however, that each set piece has been constructed as a routine and strung together rather arbitrarily. So we start with Sobelle versus fly – a hilarious, if staple, piece of physical comedy – before Ford versus rodent and, finally, both versus grizzly bear. With an escalating formula replacing real development, Flesh and Blood… offers more as metaphor than it does in performance.

Clearly, there are environmental and evolutionary concerns, often drawing on the old human nature documentary routine. Beneath the surface, however, it nails the innate pointlessness of human existence and the structure of civilisation, in a way that only clowns can manage, shattering those things we hold central to our daily lives – profit margins, relationships, ambitions – by holding them against a bigger picture. Inspired by the town abandoned after the Chernobyl disaster, which has since been under nature’s occupation, Flesh and Blood… forces us to ask to what end all this ultimately aims. What, in real terms, gets left behind?

But it does so with a sense of fun, ridiculing mankind’s absurd attempts at dignity. Beyond that, however, there’s a comforting warmth; a suggestion that futility is just fine. In the end, a bloodied Sobelle clutches Ford’s corpse and dies in front of an idyllic woodland tableau. Birds hang from the ceiling; deer gather round; hills roll into the distance and autumnal leaves fall and bury the bodies. The echo, whether conscious or not, is of Kane’s Blasted, only transferred from hell’s void to Disney’s wonderland. “A post-apocalyptic Eden,” say the programme notes, that suggests, whether with or without us, everything will be just fine.

Review: La Maldicion de Poe, Southbank Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Edgar Allen Poe’s writing chills. His most famous images – the immovable Raven that moves from oddity to irritant to menace; the unstoppable beating of the Tell-Tale Heart – slowly bore their way into your brain. I doubt that he would have come up with a goofy gorilla on a Ripper’s rampage. It lacks finesse.

That probably goes for the entirety of La Maldicion de Poe, which – though it translates as The Curse of Poe – might be better served by the title La Farsa de Poe. Or better still, Calamity Poe.

In it, a young Edgar Allen falls in love with Annabel, whose playful affection diminishes as she succumbs to tuberculosis. Meanwhile, across town, a performing gorilla slips out of his lease and grows slasher-happy, murdering Poe’s grandparent’s, leaving Poe as suspect on the run. From that point on, the gauche and ghoulish puppets of Teatro Corsario play out a cop-chase caper. Fleeing from an inspector, Edgar Allen Poe gets entangled in another murder, a body-disposal mission, caught and on the cusp of execution, before escaping to mourn Annabel’s death.

With little connection to Poe’s work, beyond the notion that he is stalked by death, Teatro Corsario provide no insight on the man. Poe is reduced to the arbitrary central point of silly escapades. His estimable identity serves only to give a boyish puppet a degree of dignity. These things, we project, should not happen to a man like Poe. In that gentle subversion of our idea of Poe, taking a revered literary figure and undermining him, it is similar to the web-cartoon series, Strindberg and Helium, in which the playwright August Strindberg is seen in the company of a foolish, falsetto-voiced balloon.

Here, the whole becomes a basic – and often base – sideshow. Even on those terms, however, La Maldicion de Poe doesn’t offer enough to fully satisfy. The puerility of its humour, often reliant on puppets demonstrating animal urges and functions, infantilises its audience, offering immediate visual gags rather than developing the comedy from the situation. Nor can it handle its element of horror and thrill, wanting its gaunt, pinched-faced puppets to seem macabre as objects and simultaneously asking us to invest in them as subject to fearsome external forces, death and other threats. The two aims seem incompatible.

Only in the final scene, when a giant white shroud of death looms over the grieving Poe, does it mine a shiver. Death’s calm stillness and its warped figure work better than the frenzied inaccuracy that precedes it. The image, haunting and unnatural, is granted space to work on us, to linger and unnerve, where previously we have been forcefed. The same goes for a beautifully constructed underwater scene, in which a husband cannot escape the grip of his dead wife’s hand.

There’s technical skill on display, though more from lighting that masks than puppeteers that marvel. Too much is bungled; too much detail is lost. Fights involve animals flying around each other, like dust-clouds with protruding fists, rather than specific actions.

At its best, puppetry can afford us an outside perspective on ourselves. La Maldicion de Poe is just a succession of silly things.

Review: The Boy James, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Time Out

Portraits of JM Barrie inevitably draw too heavily on Peter Pan, as if the man behind the boy who never grew up can only be calibrated in relation to childhood. In fact, Barrie's work often grappled with very adult concerns, advocating socialism and sexual equality. Even next to more blinkered examples, Belt Up's piece is too slight and too reductive to function as biographical study.

Better taken as a fable for lost youth, The Boy James shows an ashen-faced, middle-aged man (James Wilkes) haunted by spectres of childhood. A pyjama-clad boy clambers around his study, begging for imaginary adventures. That eager innocence, however, is punctured when a girlish waif, newly dropped from the chimney, forces both whisky and herself on the boy.

With smartly restrained interaction, Belt Up involve us without patronising. Tender and momentarily harrowing, The Boy James ends on a terrific note of accusation. We, each of us, have let this happen - both to the boy and, by extension, to ourselves.

All these better elements are somewhat scuffed by naivety. Scruffy signposting muddles the narrative. The abuse suffered by the boy (played with fidgety sentimentality by Jethro Compton) could just as easily be real, with Lucy Farrett's Girl a hallucination born of dissociation. There's promise here, but to achieve real potency, it needs distilling.

Review: Black Chiffon, White Bear Theatre

Written for Time Out

Seeking forgotten fineries in the library, Andy Brunskill has surfaced with Black Chiffon, a play more moth-eathen than vintage. Though it culminates touchingly, Lesley Storm's repetitious family drama has little to commend it today.

Instead of using this tale of a well-to-do mother's kleptomania to empathize with today's squeezed middle, all Brunskill can do is follow Storm by suggesting that Oedipal urges lie beneath family divisions, as the nightdress stolen by Alicia (Maggie Daniels) proves identical to that worn by her son's fiancee. Is the existence of the subconscious really still a revelation?

Things pick up towards the end, as Alicia sacrifices herself to avoid shaming her family, but this is dully metronomic in pace - a problem worsened by wistful, lingering scene chagnes. Daniels finds an admirable dignity in Alicia and Charlotte Powell is refreshingly breezy as her pregnant daughter Thea, but on Mike Lee's sepia-toned sitting room set, Black Chiffon is mostly bland and redundant.

Review: Kaspar, Arch 6

Written for Culture Wars

In 1828, Kaspar Hauser turned up in a town square in Nurnberg claiming to have been raised in isolation in a darkened cell. Apparently equipped with no linguistic ability, Hauser could only repeat a single sentence: “I want to be a cavalryman like my father.”

Peter Handke extrapolates this further into the abstract. Ryan Kiggell’s Kaspar begins like a broken record: “I want to be someone like somebody else was once.” Rolling the syllables together disjointedly, his voice sounds oddly computerised, as if it contains traces of iron.

Unlike Werner Herzog’s film, Handke’s play does not merely retell the Hauser story. Instead, it is a staged treatise on linguistic philosophy: dense and slippery on account of moving at its own pace, rather than waiting for you to catch up. Questions buzz around like flies. Is linguistic ability somehow innate? How do we learn to assign words to things and occurrences? Does inductive application, trial and error based on resemblance, led to error or metaphor or both? Is language our way of conquering the world around us? At its centre is the basic conundrum of the dictionary. If all language is relative, oughtn’t the system collapse into circularity?

Handke’s text is a whirligig of formal logic. Ifs, thens, ands and buts flash past you like passing headlights on a highway. It stretches out like a tangled equation chalked on a vast blackboard. Every X is only a Y; Every this is that, he intones, turning the words over and over, inside and out, as if puzzling out a Rubik’s cube.

In the process, Kiggell graduates from lost boy grappling for meaning to philosophy professor, rocking back and forth in his wicker chair, with a mastery of the apparently meaningless. In a sense, this is Beckett in reverse: rather than descending into emptiness and futility, Kaspar ascends towards it. He overstretches his human dignity to the point of absurdity. Beckett’s agony becomes Handke’s bewilderment.

There’s plenty to chew over, but Kaspar’s satisfactions come after the event itself. During, it’s more than a touch bemusing; complex philosophy poeticized to the point of obscurity. As one of the disembodied voices that mould Kaspar makes clear to us, as much as him, “You’re not here to have fun.” Nonetheless, I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that Handke’s play might communicate more on the page than the stage.

In fact, the stage is acutely missing in Theatre Aya’s production, which plays in a pop-up theatre underneath a railway arch. The space is newly-renovated and biege: an office awaiting inhabitants. As a result, George Moustakas’s production gains a domestic feel, which does Handke’s play no favours. It’s central character, its chorus of echoes and its isolated items of furniture belong in the abstract space on the blank stage. Here, with skirting boards and carpet, not to mention irritating pillars blocking sitelines, it all feels too concrete.

That doesn’t help Kiggell, who constructs a character where none really exists. Handke’s Kaspar is everyman and no man at once: he is essentially human. Kiggell’s features suit that. With the clown’s constant look of surprise, they resemble a face inked on an eggshell: dots for eyes, light curves for brows. But his general demeanour is too decorous and poised to stand for us all. He becomes, instead, an amicable bumbler. Along the way, he manages to suggest a legion of familiar modes – Chaplin, Vladimir and Estragon, Pinnochio unstringed, C3P0, Steinbeck’s Lennie Small, Stuart Sherman, Tim Nice But Dim and, later, a faded Kennedy, an old matinee idol or a sozzled politician – but there is nothing base or animal about him. Kiggell’s posture is too upstanding, his vowels too plummily upper-middle class, to be simply human. He is too characterful.

Can something be of interest without actually being interesting? Perhaps that’s too harsh. The puzzle of Handke’s play engages and has left my head jangling with riddles, but its certainly one for already interested parties.

Photograph: Elisa Terren

Review: A Doll's House, Theatre Delicatessen

An edited version of this review appeared in Time Out

Feminism has come a long way since Nora first slammed the door on the toy world of her marriage in 1879. Sophie Reynolds's new adaptation interrogates the contemporary credentials of Ibsen's classic, often dubbed the first truly feminist play, and comes up with a fascinating, if dramatically hazy, two hours.

Sexual equality, Reynolds suggests, is not a woman's right to do as men do, but freedom from imposed definitions. It is the right to do as women do. Nora's triumph, then, is not simply matching her husband, but supporting him. She leaves only because Torvald refuses to reciprocate that categorical support.

But Frances Loy's all-female production takes care to judge both genders equally. Margaret-Ann Bain's pestering Torvald misguidedly assumes women want a breadwinner in the office and a mischief in the bedroom. In fact, Loy throws every social opposition - class, wealth, race - into sharp relief on the traverse stage with admirable clarity.

In a production marked by its intelligence, even supporting characters are re-evaluated, with Rhoda Ofori-Attah finding in Krogstad a good man with no option bar blackmail.

What drops out, however, is emotional engagement. Reynolds's excision of Torval's thrifitness strips Nora of her heroic stoicism. By secretly borrowing money to fun her husband's medical treatment, Nora must be risking everything. We need to see her scrimpling to pay back the debt. In weakening that threat of discovery, Reynolds dampens the drama and forces Polly Eachus to wring blood from a Sloane. Nonetheless, the flashes of revelation are recompense enough.

Review: Amphibians, Bridewell Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

The trouble with sport-based narratives is that, after all the sweat and tears, they only have two options – win or lose – and both have become hackneyed old tropes. Skeletally, at least, Amphibians conforms to those expectations, but it’s elevated by Steve Waters’s knack for finding an existential twist therein. Elsa and Max, the two Olympian swimmers whose careers we trace, don’t merely go through the trials of training and competition. They become specimens of superhumanity: as alien as they are human.

Everything about them is honed for purpose. Stray back hairs are shaved for streamlining; minor muscles are tweaked into abnormality; diaphragms are torturously retrained beyond reflex impulses. Theirs are precision calculated bodies: humanity become machine.

Life, for Max and Elsa, seems a means to an end: shaving a sliver of a second off their race times. Every second of life lived on land is a second of training missed. On the night before their respective Olympic races, the brief minutes to which everything has built, Max squirms out of the sex that has become their little ritual. “Swimming,” he says by way of justification, “is what I’m designed to do.” Not sex. Swimming.

By looking ahead to retirement, once physical peaks are reached and bodies start subsiding, Waters questions whether all this was worth it. After sacrificing ten years of youth, a few ounces of gold hardly seem recompense enough. And that’s just the winners. Silver medalists train just as hard. Indeed, Waters wonders whether it was worth anything. After all, records exist to be broken and someone will eventually swim faster. Legacy (a word now burdened with thoroughly negative connotations) is no more than another notch on a chart.

So is that life a life worth living? What happens, aged 24 or 30, when it’s no longer possible? What happens when, like the musty, drained pool in which Amphibians plays, you are no longer fit for purpose? Max and Elsa are faced, in another savvy metaphor, with adapting to terra firma and Max, at least, is all at sea.

Were Waters’s narrative played straight and naturalistic, those questions would be implicit, but at best it could only satisfy, conformative as it must be. It could not excite alone. As the Olympians, Louise Ford and Sam Heughan pay attention to age, but find little by way of unique characterisation. However, by emphasizing enquiry over plot, director Cressida Brown explodes Amphibians into a sparkling set of fragmented conundrums.

To do so, Brown employs physical theatre of the Frantic Assembly variety. A crack team of Speedoed commandos, inventively and attentively choreographed by Kate Sagovsky, burst into pulsating sequences of Meyerholdian exercises. Their shoulders twirl; their hamstrings strain. Naked apart from trunks and swimcaps, they seem another species. And they breathe like a percussion section, capturing the rhythmic pulse of endlessly repeated action. A human techno soundtrack.

Add in Georgia Lowe’s gorgeous design, split over three tiers and lit beautifully by Richard Williamson, and you have an intoxicating blend of total theatre. Visual spectacle, simply constructed but full of layers, and a complex consideration of a fascinating subject make Amphibians a fringe delight.