Figurentheater Triangel
Metamorphosis
Theatre de la Marmaille/
Teatro dell’Angolo
Promised Land
Rough Magic Theatre
Bat the Father, Rabbit the Son
Velo Theatre
Enveloppes et Deballages
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Sprinkled throughout the theatre program are a number of smaller productions, one and two-handers which are the bonbons in the Festival’s own version of the Fringe. These shows are mostly sixty minutes long, often twilight performances and all with broad appeal.
The festival organisers already know from the success of the Phillippe Genty Company that Adelaide audiences go mad for visual fantasy theatre, especially, in the case of Genty, when it is tinged with just the right amount of prurience and sentiment.
The season at the Cottage Theatre opened with the show by the Dutch duo Figurentheater Triangel. Henk Boerwinkel’s marionettes and puppets have a grim vocabulary drawn from nightmare and phobia. An angst-ridden figure buries his face in his hands, a crow appears and steals a baby from its wizened guardian. A giant reaches down and terrifies some mortal only to be brought down himself, bitten by a huge hairy spider. A head separates from a sleeping body, snaking into the air with vertebrae attached. A cyclops pulls out his eye, screws it into a camera and takes a picture of the audience.
Boerwinkel comes out of the tiny booth that is his operating HQ to have a chat with the audience. He likes marionettes, he says, because they have indirect movement. He then goes back inside to indirectly rain down more creepy images -rats, guilloutines, and a series of struggles between Punchinella and the unseen puppet master. One particularly grotesque image has a figure unbandaging another’s head to reveal a brain which is then removed and uncoiled. These transformations and metamorphoses may owe something to Ovid but more to Dali or the darker moments of Henson and Oz. It is an absorbing show but despite the descriptive captions – reality, fantasy and so on- it has the effect of a dream which is beyond unraveling.
At the Arts Theatre the collaborative venture between Theatre de la Marmaille of Montreal and Teatro dell’Angolo of Turin entitled Promised Land is less engaging. Despite high production values such as the pin sharp synthesised sound and the effectiveness of the acting area – defined by the curtain being lowered to about four feet from the stage, creating a cinemascope effect. Arms, legs, occasionally whole bodies appear as part of a cavalcade of activity from primeval time to the present. A flat rock is the constant factor, reminder of the endurance of the natural world against the transience of human endeavour. The show is an uninterestingly earnest piece. The History of the World Parts I and II it seemed- with a lot of technical skill but very little resonance. Promised Land does not fulfil its promise.
The Rough Theatre Company – for this festival at least- comprises solo writer and performer Donal Kelly. His show Bat the Father Rabbit the Son is a discursive portrait of the artist as a young rabbit. Bullied by the ghost of Bat, a windbag father very like Dedalus senior, or John Joyce for that matter, Rabbit is a middle-aged trucking tycoon unsafe from the psychic past or the economic predations of the present.
Kelly succeeds in being disconcertingly rabbity and inhabits a range of characters -few of them easy, on themselves or others. He creates a fooking rich torrent of Dublin patois and there are some majestic passages on life in the Liffee -sewage and mackerel and all the philosophies between. Bat the Father is an engaging piece but needs twenty minutes nipped out of it. Often the fine blather creates more texture than pattern and some fascinating possibilities are short-circuited.
The Velo company deal in the theatre of objects and a strange little world they inhabit. Enveloppes and Deballages – wrappings and unwrappings- is an eccentric little bijou about a postman who starts investigating the parcels he is delivering. One carton breaks open to reveal a jungle full of frogs and snakes and dragons with battery-operated eyes. The daggy props -wind-up drummers, rubber sharks and remote controlled jeeps- are all incorporated into a narrative that flies over volcanoes and crosses a blue cellophane sea to find a circus. Velo’s director Tania Castaing and performer Charlot Lemoine give new meaning to the word inconsequential. It is whimsical fantasy for all. Some may find it too fey for its own good, but its good-natured anti-illusionist pranking is hard to resist.
The Adelaide Review, No.100, March 1992 p.33.
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02/27/9202/27/92/