mime
Ismene Brown
The puppets appearing in LIMF this year are by no means all child-friendly - after the mild kiddy-horror of Teatro Corsario and their hand-manipulated Bunraku creatures, the return of the much more disturbing imagination of Patrick Sims, founder and governing mad scientist of Buchinger’s Boot Marionettes, was my most-looked-for event. The unhinged strangeness of Armature of the Absolute and of Shellachrymellaecum still rattles discomfitingly around in the darker corners of my memory from time to time, scratchy, dusty flutterings of skeletal critters, tiny fairy babies sobbing in jars of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The up - which I’m sorry not to have reported on before it ended last night - was the Spanish puppetry troupe Teatro Corsario, who made their hour’s strut and fret upon the stage in the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room a pleasingly diverting wee horror tale, La Maldición de Poe (The Curse of Poe), filled with gory corpses and spectral lighting and awful bloodthirsty characters.Mashing up three Poe stories - The Black Cat, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the ditty Annabel Lee - the little team of five came up with an impressively populated narrative where Edgar fell in love with sick Annabel Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The mistake was probably that I hadn’t tanked up beforehand. Clues were there. Soho Theatre is over a pub. 9.45pm start. Who’s going to turn up in those circumstances completely sober? Who would be mad enough to turn up in Soho at 9.45pm stone-cold sober? And a four-star Edinburgh Fringe show had not necessarily been assessed by altogether un-punchdrunk viewers, lurching as they do (and I have done) between five shows a night.Well, something had to account for The Boy With Tape On His Face being, sigh, not that funny. Sometimes, as Penelope Keith moaned in The Good Life, I feel that I’m not a Read more ...
Veronica Lee
This is a show of such originality and inventiveness that I will struggle to convey just how much fun it is to watch a man perform sight gags and physical comedy for an hour - and who does indeed appear throughout with a strip of black gaffer tape over his mouth.The Boy with Tape on His Face, Gilded Balloon ****
Although New Zealander Sam Wills doesn’t speak a word and uses clowning skills in his act, this is far removed from the kind of knockabout humour that is usually accompanied by a hooter to mark the punchline. Instead he has an incredibly expressive face to convey his thoughts, whether Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Compagnie Ieto are two modest Frenchmen with immodest circus skills - modesty in all the right proportions. Jonathan Guichard and Fnico Feldmann teamed up in 2006 and were finalists in the 2008 Jeunes Talents Cirque with this show Ieto, last night's hugely entertaining offering at the Purcell Room by the London International Mime Festival. Mime theatre can be spoilt sometimes by lofty pretensions, but here all that was lofty was the eyewatering height at which Feldmann and Guichard were prepared to stand on perilous structures which they gleefully destabilised under themselves.Guichard is an Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Call me old-fashioned, but when a bunch of people have trained in circus and French mime theatre, I’m expecting to be astonished, thoroughly surprised, and occasionally to feel the sweat breaking out on my palms. Can one enjoy circus skills without fear and awe being supplied? The aerialist theatre troupe Ockham’s Razor provide a sensational hamster-wheel set for their new show, The Mill, powered by human hamsters, but don’t serve up physical jinks of matching sensationalism. I grew up before the health and safety age killed off danger, and I like my acrobatics razor-sharp and daredevil.The Read more ...
Ismene Brown
I whizzed back to my previous reviews of BlackSkyWhite when I got home last night to check how much I’d enjoyed them in the past, so disappointing was their offering for the London International Mime Festival, USSR Was Here. Russians have colonised mime theatre with a razor-edged passion and ingenuity in theatrecraft that usually makes any Russian company a must-see in the Mimefest. Derevo are the masters (pupils originally of the great Slava Polunin), but Derevo quit Russia for Germany and now BlackSkyWhite have the political field to themselves. USSR Was Here, created in fact long ago in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Don’t look down,” comes the exhortation from somewhere on the floor. "Look ahead." I am testing out a new bit of kit, a large wooden cylinder encased in a metal frame, suspended via ropes and pulleys from a high ceiling. The diameter is big enough for me to be able to stand up and walk. Or not. The inclination is to watch your feet as, like a hamster, you power the rotation of the drum. Trouble is if you look down you lose your balance. So I look ahead and take grandmother’s footsteps which are barely strong enough to get the thing moving at all. "Take bigger strides," comes more advice. But Read more ...
Jasper Rees
These photographs shows Ockham's Razor in performance. While there is a fierce kinetic energy to their work, photography captures something of its still beauty. The images come from four shows they have devised and performed on their own - Memento Mori (2004) Every Action... (2005), Arc (2007) and The Mill (2010) - and Hang On (2008), created in collaboration with Theatre-Rites.All images by Nik Mackey unless stated.Memento MoriEvery Action... iEvery Action... iiArc iArc ii The Mill iThe Mill iiThe Mill iiiHang On (image by Patrick Baldwin)[bg|/THEATRE/jasper_rees/Ockhams_Razor]Book for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Clowns are supposed to be chubby, grinning, funny, with anarchic hair and big red noses, like Coco. Or they are Chaplin-types, oppressed little city folk mutely combating the vast machines of the working life. They are not generally shaven-headed skinny men and women with beaky noses, starved cheekbones, and a way of life so severely monastic that it would drive you or me stark staring mad.But then Derevo are not ordinary clowns. If you have seen either of this Russian company’s two productions that have visited London and Edinburgh in recent years you will know this. The Red Zone was an Read more ...