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
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