For 40 years, Green Ginger has been producing innovate and award-winning theatre but, although its latest offering is a great concept and shows promise, it is sadly below par.
Inspired by 1966 cult sci-fi film Fantastic Journey and Beezer comicstrip Numskulls, the Company has devised a world in which miniscule intronauts can be purchased and inserted into the body to maintain and clean.
Portrayed on three levels: the graphic designer host struggling with low mood, anal itch and logo colour decisions; the intronaut combatting a desperately lonely lifestyle within the in-body maintenance machine, and a long view where a tiny intronaut is seen scrambling around organs and intestines, the piece is meandering and its focus fuzzy.
Navigating the host body in a pod reminiscent of a sawn-off VW Campervan, dance diva Emma Keaveney-Roys deploys attachments to scrape, delve and polish for routine upkeep or dons a spacesuit to venture forth for less mundane requests and inspections. Encountering blood clots, all-enveloping fronds and passing nuclei, her ventures are a welcome relief from the tedium of solitary confinement.
The host’s call to venture into the forbidden realms of the brain to fiddle with his happiness centres provokes much angst, twitching, fantasy and dance but opportunity seems lost as the effect is pedestrian and inconclusive.
Puppetry is, as ever with Green Ginger, excellent and Chris Pirie’s gauzy screen onto which projections are thrown is clever but rather disengages the audience.
I so wanted to like this but the 55 minutes dragged and, despite a couple of fun or quirky moments, failed to impress.