Traverse Theatre,
Edinburgh
3 stars
The popcorn handed out
to the audience on the way in to see Made in China's two-handed
dissection of happiness is as playfully deceptive as everything that
follows. The black-clad young woman standing atop a platform licking
an ice lolly who greets us similarly wrong-foots any implied fun and
games. Over its fifty minute duration, however, Tim Cowbury's script
morphs into an increasingly manic and unreliable memoir of apparently
shared experience in search of meaning.
The woman on the
platform is Jess. The young man that slinks on sporting a Sideshow
Bob hair-do is Chris. As the pair gaze out at the audience, they
claim to be best friends. In-between downing cans of beer pulled from
an ice-box beside Jess, the duo tell elaborate shaggy-dog stories and
do dance routines to David Bowie's Rebel Rebel and Susan Cadogan's
reggae take on Hurt So Good. They cover themselves in flour and
tomato ketchup, putting themselves through dramatic endurance tests
as their words and actions become more desperate and frenetic. Where
Jess and Chris look for eternal salvation, they remain stuck with an
endless round of cheap thrills, sugar rushes and bad memories.
Developed at Forest
Fringe by Cowbury with performers Jessica Latowicki and Christopher
Brett Bailey, and with support by the National Theatre Studio, this
is a quirkily realised and often very funny study of how memories
become myths. Among all the live art detritus, In the end, it's as if
fairy-tale trouble-makers Hansel and Gretel had discovered an off
licence next to the sweet shop and rewritten Samuel Beckett's Happy
Days in their own messed-up image.
The Herald, November 13th 2012
ends
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