Review: My Life with the Dogs, Pleasance Courtyard

Written for Culture Wars

You expect wheezing accordions and battered suitcases of New International Encounter, not bass guitars and megaphones. However, My Life with the Dogs replaces the sepia-toned, rustic comforts of their European Narratives Trilogy with the grit and grime of urban existence, telling the true tale of nine-year old street-urchin Ivan Mishukov and his canine companions.

As such, we’re in contemporary Moscow, where the shell-suit still reigns supreme and radios crackle with Nirvana and Frank Sinatra. In its midst, Ivan lives with his alcoholic mother, suffering regular beatings and banished to the kitchen whenever Uncle Boris comes round to “drink vodka and do the noises.” One day, having interrupted this ritual, Ivan ambles innocently out of the door, down the stairs and into the streets, where he is eventually adopted by a pack of wild dogs.

Welcome though the company’s aesthetic shift is, My Life with the Dogs goes easy on the city’s perils, letting out a whimper where it needs to bare its teeth. As such, all is made cuddly, from the Disneyfied strays in woolly hats to Alex Bryne’s Elvis-impersonating paedophile. While the intention may be to show through childish eyes, the result is to mute the story’s drama.

If they miss its nature, however, NiE capture the look and sounds of the city beautifully. With careful lighting, including a perfect shift to the all-encompassing orange glow of dusk, and an inventive sound design, whereby a megaphone cannily simulates the products of mass mediatisation, NiE create a city suddenly self-conscious and repulsed, lured by transmissions from an exciting elsewhere.

Ivan’s story is told with simplicity and clarity, despite sagging slightly when it prefers generalisations over particular events from his street life. What it lacks, however, is the company’s ability to interrogate their own craft. The mischief – even the wilful, joyous anarchy – that has marked their previous work is sorely missed here, as Ivan seems too in control of his version of events. Byrne’s direction neglects the need to play, to go too far and, with it, the ability to really entertain.

If the European Narratives Trilogy made NiE a safe bet of the Fringe, they have themselves suffered from playing it too safe. It flashes with former innovations, but remains a show too docile with little bark or bite.