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Fringe 2005 Reviews (10)
ImMortal 2
By Firenza Guidi
The Big Top, Leith Walk
***
This has to be one of the strangest offerings at the Fringe, an annual
event that is not renowned for its orthodoxy.
Nofitstate is a Cardiff-based circus company that has a lot going for
it. This year, it celebrates its twentieth birthday and, as a pillar
of its local community, has achieved charitable status.
The current tour may be their most ambitious as the company, complete
with their tardis-like big top, which seems so much bigger from the
inside, have already played at three Welsh and four English venues.
Still ahead for the 50-strong team are a trip to Catalunya in September
and from 17 September for a couple of weeks, the London Thames Festival.
ImMortal 2 is both more and less than a traditional circus.
Animals and pure clowns are now out of fashion and so the programme
concentrates on the acrobatics and comedy. No one seems to have told
them about gravity: even the "trainees" are able to swirl
around high above the ground showing the greatest bravery and panache,
while the experts fly.
They are also very audience friendly as the punters promenade around
the top getting almost dangerously close to the action at times. This
proximity does add a dimension to the experience so that you can begin
to make friends with some of the performers and their family of young
hangers-on.
The story is very dark. The top is a slaughterhouse and human flesh
has become cheap. This theme threads through the action of the evening.
All is enhanced by the gypsy music of a band led by exotic Rudy, music
director and player Peter Swaffer Reynolds, and the spectacular lighting
design of Adam Cobley which really complements director Firenza Guidi's
eye for the artistic and romantic.
The circus skills are impressive with unusual solo highlights such
as a hula hoop routine that is unforgettable, a dazzling trapeze set
and great work on ropes and bungees. The company is often at its best
with the choreographed team work that can see eight people simultaneously
suspended in mid-air or the whole lot dancing and leaping their way
through the audience.
Philip Fisher
All Wear Bowlers
Geoff Sobelle & Trey Lyford
Aurora Nova@St Stephen's
***
Two tramps (Earnest and Wyatt) in bowler hats, vaguely reminiscient
of Laurel and Hardy, approach along a country path in a black and white
film. They start a disagreement and one is pushed so hard he falls out
of the screen and appears on stage, much to his surprise and discomfort,
in front of a live audience. The pair of them darting back and forth
on and off the screen with disbelief in a spiral of inventive and absurd
gags provides for some delightful laughter. Their comic timing is perfection
itself. Lyford and Sobelle give us a pair of traditional music hall
clowns the likes of which disappeared into the Mack Sennett studios
and onto the silent screens in the 1920s and were lost to live audiences
for ever - until now. And it's great to have them back. This is slapstick
and physical comedy at it's very, very, very best. Sobelle and Lyford
blow new life into comfortlingly old and familiar routines and are an
utterly loveable duo.
When their film melts and their road back onto the screen is cut off,
they panic. Escape from all these frightening people is their first
priority and they try out a number of increasingly unlikely points of
exit with disastrous results. Vetriloquism, vaudeville and magic are
all part of the act, but there are some modern twists. For example,
the ventriloquist dummy turns into a very nasty dolly indeed, the Travis
Bickle of the dummy world. Lyford and Sobelle are a truly symbiotic
pair of clowns and a sizeable measure of the delight comes from the
feelings of awe inspired by their dexterity.
This is a show that kids will appreciate and it's quite a sad thing
that kids these days get most of their humour from callow TV cartoons.
But this not a children's show as such and some of its richness can
be drawn from our recognition of their helplessness and anxieties, their
touching interdependence and the panic at being in a situation beyond
their control. These are the human aspects we apprehend as adults. The
performance is a trifle long and in places some cuts would be effective,
but Sorbell and Lyford are the genuine article and I wouldn't have missed
this for the world. Thanks fellas!
Jackie Fletcher
The Department
Jo Stromgron Kompani
Aurora Nova@St Stephen's
*****
If you can imagine an episode of The Office scripted by Franz Kafka
and directed by John Cleese then you'd be close to the surreal and manic
comedy of The Department. Add to the equation four superb performers
and you have a show that is utterly engaging and delectably hilarious,
and yet retains an element of the sinister. One has the feeling throughout
that beneath the surface action lurks a few unpleasant metaphysical
truths that resonate in our contemporary culture.
Four rather nondescript clerks, permanent denizens of a grim and utilitarian
office building (all grey cupboards and a chaos of scattered paperwork),
are trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare of endless and repetitive but
seemingly pointless procedures. Each of these is signaled by the noise
of a container carrying a message through a system of pneumatic tubes.
When it arrives they jump to attention, the message is typed and then
transmitted over a microphone indicated by a green light. This broadcast
is then followed by a flashing red light, a harsh buzzing noise of urgency
which is the prompt to receive a phone call, presumably from the dictatorial,
Big Brother figure, whose portrait appears towards the end. The entire
show is in a gibberish language based on Norwegian and while this seems
odd at first, it heightens the nonsensical element of the procedures.
The situation is recognizable and the physical comedy renders it all
very comprehensible.
These men long for a better life in an outside only indicated by a
light shining through a door. Equally they fear the unknown; they fear
the consequences of disobedience. When one of them actually disappears
through the door into the light the others are in a whirlwind of mixed
emotions: admiration, fear, desire, confusion. What gives The Department
an edge over other theatrical attempts to illustrate the banal aimlessness
of our dystopian societies is that this is dance theatre rather than
realism. The absurdist and comic irony is injected though movement and
song, dance parody, and yet these talented performers engross us with
truly recognizable and endearing characters.
It's a great pity there were only four performances. If you find this
performance coming to a venue near to you in the future kill for a ticket.
Jackie Fletcher
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