In the middle of the night, a ballerina (Vyta Garriga) is sat upon a park bench, folding an ever-growing pile of origami swans, when an overenthusiastic security guard (Daniel Chrisostomou) arrives and tries to get her to leave. What follows is a spiralling series of bizarrely recurring encounters in which the disparate perspectives and identities of the two characters begin to clash over and over again.
As a very stylised piece of theatre of the absurd, it’s both difficult and slightly futile to try to explain too much about Paper Swans. There’s a clear sense of inanity from the bizarre situation, which recurs in a dreamlike or even nightmarish fashion as the cycles continue.
The pair seem to represent a duality in many ways, costumed in white and black, with Garriga acting naturally while Chrisostomou moves and even speaks with an almost clockwork automatonism. She is the freedom and chaos to his logic and order. But this being proper absurdist theatre, there isn’t a clear-cut meaning to it, and what everyone individually manages to draw from it is rather the point in and of itself.
That said, there are clear indications that this in some way reflects the clash between artistic expression and oppressive authority and the use of violence and literal blood-spilling as a note of finality, commenting perhaps on the suppression of art or free speech, and yet, maybe not at all.
In any case, it is a fascinating, if at times confounding display of theatrical bizarreness, and one that is absolutely the sort of artistry and nonsense that the Fringe is supposed to be all about.