REVIEW: MY PERFECT MIND Those artful jokers at Told By An Idiot are entering dangerous ground with My Perfect Mind , a unique retelling of how ultimate thesp Edward Petherbridge suffered a stroke during rehearsals for his eponymous role in King Lear . Less of a ‘play within a play’, and more of a ‘play torn up and thrown back to stain the wall while the players narrowly avoid falling into the trapdoor’ firecracker of a piece, My Perfect Mind shows how daring this company is as it brings Told By An Idiot’s signature sharp-witted silliness back to the home ground of the theatre. In this surrealist meditation on performance, reality, madness, tragedy, modern art, travel and life in the ‘thee-ay-tahr’, Petherbridge returns to tread tilted boards and tell his own story. Joined on stage by the thrillingly versatile Paul Hunter, the septuagenarian – now fully recovered – travels through the muddled pages of his biography, attending rehearsals at a New Zealand playhouse, meeting his mother two days before his own birth, consulting with doctors in an oh so very different type of theatre, and returning to the pavilion of his hometown in the body of an experienced actor...
REVIEW: THÉRÈSE RAQUIN The forces of society and the drives of the individual are not the best bedfellows in this racy take on Émile Zola’s classic, from adapter/director Nona Shepphard. Loyal to the novel’s characteristic naturalism, and faithful to its eagerness to shock, Shepphard gives us an eponymous heroine with a distinct breed of socialised selfishness. Thérèse is, at once, a fiery individual who stubbornly acts as the author of her own fate; in other ways, the production holds its lead character up as an example of society’s power over its subjects, as husband Camille (Jeremy Legat) and his manipulative mother, Madame Raquin (played with a thrillingly egomaniacal zest by Tara Hugo), pull at the puppet strings of Thérèse’s life. Borrowing a little bit from Jackanory, and a little bit from Euripides, Thérèse Raquin starts off by putting an RP-accented storyteller and a taunting citizen chorus on stage to introduce the central characters and pave the way for their downfall. Evidently well-versed in the literary theory behind this text, the production treats its central characters as little more than case studies; we are immediately told that, “In the world there are billions of human animals. Here is one: Thérèse.”...
REVIEW: ITMOI Accessibility is clearly not Akram Khan’s top priority. The name of this piece alone is a code that refuses to be cracked, a far from obvious acronym that brings a murky tide of mystery to Khan’s stabs at biographical representation. Those brave enough to venture beyond the smug title will not be rewarded with much more clarity. Commissioned to mark the centenary of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring , Khan’s piece – subtitled ‘in the mind of igor’ – attempts to penetrate and illuminate the imagination of this great composer, and reflect new insights into what is widely held to be his greatest work. Fittingly, Khan mimics the elusive nature of his musical inspiration in form as much as content; as a result, in the midst of all of this cryptology, it soon becomes clear that Stravinsky’s mind isn’t an easy one to access. The composer’s genius is presented as one sculpted by religious dogma, moulded by a troubling fixation with sacrifice, and embellished with disjointed and faceless erotic fantasy. The foundations of this evocative psychoanalytical profile are set by TJ Lowe, this company’s stand-out dancer. Lowe takes on the part of a devilish preacher –...
REVIEW: WAITING FOR GODOT Estragon and Vladimir really haven’t been waiting that long. A few decades younger than the actors who normally tap their feet and sigh throughout this play, viral wonders Tom Stourton and Tom Palmer inject a certain fresh-faced vitality into one of Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated, and visually iconic, texts. And with this youthfulness comes an added cheeky spirit, as our central duo bring the kind of comedy and intelligence we’ve come to expect from the lads who piled up thousands of YouTube hits mocking Bristol University’s ‘rah’ culture. While more conventional productions of Waiting for Godot have used old Estragon and Vladimir’s dry, worldly negativity to expose Beckett’s existential thrust, director Simon Dormandy’s production brings in playground silliness to mock conventions in speech and behaviour. Indeed, for most of this show, Stourton and Palmer act like children. They tumble over each other, skip across the stage, mimic pop songs, and generally seem unsure about what to do about the other adults who enter their stagnant world. Palmer’s Vladimir, the spectacle-twitching young man destined to be top of his class, looks at the new leaves on their tree with a naive wonder; Tom Stourton’s Estragon, the...
REVIEW: Shaun Caton: CULT HOUSE at Artsadmin For a piece that clashes ancient themes of shamanism with layers of neon paint, Cult House feels remarkably cohesive. A solo work “triggered” by lost items coughed up by the Thames, and accessorised with gel pens and antique cabinets, tin-foil babies and cut flowers, Shaun Caton’s work is indebted to our ancestors, but delivers a smooth, if fleeting, reconciliation of past and present. The mood is British Museum meets down-beat rave, all wrapped in neo-noir psychological horror, and the emphatically mysterious Caton navigates a trance-like state with a deliberate mournfulness that bridges the gap between arts centre and artefact . But while there’s comfort in this unlikely blend of the historic and the contemporary, Cult House is not an easy piece to experience, and the work is as frustrating as it is hypnotic. Alongside his curious and provocative props, Caton’s quietly villainous alter ego sprinkles and sidesteps a number of intellectual traps. It would, for instance, be easy to criticise the artist for his unapologetic Primitivism. With crude masks and Neanderthal movements, the artist plots a shortcut to a simpler time where ritual ruled reason – yet there is much more at...
REVIEW: Dead Arise Unknown forests, secretive dungeons and dangerous minds: to contemplate horror is often to contemplate the unknown. And so when flung, with eyes and ears locked into an alternative digital reality, straight into an unfamiliar virtual hospital populated by army personnel and zombies, you’d think it would be the unfamiliar things that trigger the old heebie jeebies. But in Aaron Reeves’ immersive video experience, which brings two isolated participants into an intertwining fifteen-minute storyline, it’s the familiar things that shock. Just as you adjust to the dislocation between the world that surrounds you and the world held inside your video goggles, and just as you start trusting the performance artists who guide you as you walk, effectively blindfolded, through the Camden People’s Theatre basement, Dead Arise pulls out a shocking dose of the everyday, shuffling the relationship between illusion and reality so that you never quite feel settled. Each singular, unchangeable narrative leaves very little space for the participants’ creative input, yet the neat coordination between audio/visual technology and live sensation incorporates all five senses, and renders each audience member fully involved. While the pre-recorded video and sound measure the tempo of the piece, the artists –...