fri 29/03/2024

mime

Dimanche, Edinburgh International Festival 2023 review - troubling and bewildering

A toy car – in fact, a mobile home with comically enormous antenna on top – shudders over arms and shoulders as if they were mountain ranges. A colossal polar bear comforts its curious cub. A lifesize puppet grandmother is chased up and down stairs...

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Room, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - decadent, extravagant, and somewhat mystifying

"I feel I owe you an explanation." That much James Thierrée concedes partway through his sprawling, freewheeling, dream-like, hallucinatory Room in Edinburgh’s King’s Theatre. By which stage, most of the audience was probably in agreement. It’s a...

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The Wedding, Gecko Theatre, Barbican review - eccentric, ebullient exploration of our contract with society

You never forget your first Gecko production. I experienced mine almost 20 years ago at the Battersea Arts Centre, when the company performed Tailors’ Dummies, its ingenious surreal show about obsession. This had all the hallmarks that would make...

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Project Dictator, New Diorama Theatre review - anarchic satire

When Rhum + Clay conceived this show, the idea of a comic becoming a political leader might have prompted thoughts of Boris Johnson's carefully cultivated buffoonery on "Have I Got News For You" and elsewhere. Since then, a certain Volodymyr...

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Corin Sworn: Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Whitechapel Gallery

Glasgow-based Corin Sworn is the fifth winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Every two years a British artist is chosen on the basis of a proposal, rather than existing work. The fashion house then supports the project with funding, a bespoke...

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The Tempest Replica, Kidd Pivot, Birmingham Hippodrome

If, standing on a station platform, your arms want to make shapes in the air; if, walking home, you are mesmerised by the curved toes of your shoes against the pavement; if, in the kitchen, a stray salad leaf on the floor transforms before your eyes...

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Harlekin, Derevo, Linbury Studio Theatre

I've always keenly anticipated Derevo. A rare sight in London, they are the must-catch company in a singular branch of mime theatre - some would call it clowning, from an oblique, dark place of visions, fears and childlike imaginings. They are a...

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Julien Cottereau: Imagine Toi, Purcell Room

There’s something off stage, something loud and threatening, pulsating in dark red, at the beginning of Julien Cottereau’s solo mime piece Imagine Toi. This is a show of fears and sweetnesses, and there’s no holding back on the former as we progress...

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Slava's Snowshow, Royal Festival Hall

Slava’s Snowshow is a Christmas package you don’t want to have unwrapped for you by someone else's description - it’s a fantastical, childlike, theatrical experience that for many is among the most profoundly delighting of their theatre-going...

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Doctor Brown, Soho Theatre

Clowning, despite its association with great funnymen such as Joseph Grimaldi and Charlie Chaplin, has always had a dark underside of melancholy or even menace. More latterly it has been thought of in terms of “low” arts such as circus and street...

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Du Goudron et Des Plumes, Barbican/ Flogging a Dead Horse, Roundhouse Studio

Five people stand in the dark. A bleak gantry descends with a rumble onto their heads. They scuttle under it and flatten themselves to escape a crushing, but then they get up and start building. The platform is stripped of planks, rebuilt at crazy...

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Les Antliaclastes, Institute of Contemporary Arts/ A Guide to Puppetry

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...

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