|
|
 |
| |
BAC to its best
BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA
Battersea Arts Centre (BAC)
PERCHED somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and The League of Gentlemen, early Disney and late Marquis de Sade, theatrical newcomers 1927’s production of ten vignettes has all the lowering absurdity and louche prowl of a wonderland Cheshire cat.
For all the comparisons their Edinburgh Festival transfer provokes, however, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is very much its own show: a patchwork creature of video projection, animation, mime, story telling and physical comedy that is, on balance, greater than the sum of its parts.
After its meticulous transformation for Punchdrunk’s Masque of the Red Death earlier this year, the BAC has reinvented itself yet again, this time as a macabre red velvet vaudeville palace. Gothic usherettes guide the audience through a yawning – or roaring - mouth into a lush concert hall reminiscent of the Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. A woman, her face painted white, makes melancholy music on a piano facing the stage.
The visual elements are superb: the physical comedy is impeccably timed, and the fey, old world look and feel of the show has been studied to the smallest detail. The production is less steady on its legs when it makes overtures towards modernity. Its humour – surreal whimsy in the style of The Mighty Boosh that hovers on the point of gibberish – is particularly suspect, though thankfully used with restraint.
But when The Devil is good – the sinister twins of The Grandmother and The Lodger stories or The Misadventures of Frau Smatterling, a pastiche of early German Expressionist cinema – it is very good indeed.
At one hour it’s a slip of a thing, but well worth the trip south; 1927 have proved themselves a company to watch.
Run ended (January 11) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
