Skip to main content

Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018 Theatre Reviews - Chase Scenes / Famous Puppet Death Scenes

CanadaHub @ King’s Hall
Four stars

A woman steps on the stage looking like a heroine on the run from a film noir. On the screens behind her she’s just been revealed in an actual movie, walking in the park after dark. Now, in the flesh, the scene is so familiar you think you know what’s coming next. As it turns out, the woman, followed around with two others filming her for a live video feed, makes the equivalent of a jump cut and a quick-fire costume change, and we’re onto the next thing.

Over the next hour in Chase Scenes, the trio, led by the show’s creator Ming Hon, take turns to act out sixty bite-size scenarios that move between madcap and mayhem. Hon, Alexandra Elliot and Hilary Anne Crist simulate running upstairs, downstairs, up on the roof and late for the train, all the while being chased by a series of nightmares that simply won’t let up. It’s an exhausting (for them) and at times cartoon-like subversion of male gaze clichés that drag the audience along for the ride in entertainingly breathless fashion.

If Hon’s creation looks like the wild card of the CanadaHub programme, Famous Puppet Death Scenes takes things even more out there even as the Old Trout Puppet Theatre’s compendium of gothic miniatures does exactly what its title suggests. Our host for the evening is one Nathaniel Tweak, an ancient marionette with the gravitas of the solitary late-night freaks framing episodes of The Twilight Zone and its ilk. Tweak conveys the earnestness of the occasion, with dark shades of Edward Gorey leavened by a gallows humour. All of this comes to life, and indeed death, in a series of brutal encounters punctuated by a running gag involving what might well be the hand of God.

The Herald, August 11th 2018

ends








Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever – Snapshots Of Masters Of The Multiverse

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School

1

In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.

This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.

The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.

The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
Post a Comment
Read more

Peter Brook – The Prisoner

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has alr…
Post a Comment
Read more

Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare's Globe Comes to Glasgow

Open-air Shakepeares are a summer-time perennial of the theatre calendar, attracting picnicking audiences as much as midges. More often than not, such romps through the grass are frothy, heritage industry affairs designed to be accompanied by strawberries and cream and not to be taken too seriously. Shakespeare’s Globe theatre company look set to change such perceptions when they open their outdoor tour of Romeo And Juliet in Glasgow next week as part of the West End festival.

For the two young actors taking the title roles of the doomed lovers, it will also be something of a homecoming. Richard Madden and Ellie Piercy both studied in Glasgow prior to turning professional. Indeed, Madden has yet to graduate from the acting course at RSAMD, and, as well as facing the pressures of playing such a meaty role in close proximity to the audience, will have the added anxiety of being assessed and graded by his tutors.

“This is the end of my third year,” says Madden following a Saturday mornin…
Post a Comment
Read more