DAEDALUS & ICARUS. To 29 November.

London.

DAEDALUS & ICARUS
by Homayun Ghanizadeh.

Barbican Theatre (The Pit) To 29 November 2008.
7.45pm.
Runs 1hr 5min No interval.

TICKETS: 0845 120 7511.
www.barbican.co.uk/bite
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 November.

Sparks fly in theatrical flight of fancy.
Iran’s Mungu Theatre company come to this high-flying tale after their inaugural Waiting For Godot, and it shows. The clown-like relationship between father and son incorporates the formality and repetitions of Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, and they’re similarly contrasting characters.

Daedalus is all about order, explaining everything by splitting people into three categories, himself at the top. Son Icarus gives the answers he knows are wanted, thereby underpinning his father’s mindset. But he’s emotionally responsive and deeply concerned about saving the mouse that’s secreted itself in the pipework of their metallic labyrinth.

This is a part-modern, part-abstract telling of Daedalus’ escape, after imprisonment to prevent him revealing the secrets of the underground labyrinth he’d built for the Minotaur. Here freedom comes after noisy days knocking and welding together a flying contraption.

There’s comic precision as the two, in pilot’s hats and goggles, carry out their routines. Serious Daedalus blows out his moustachioed, bearded lips comically, and keeps collapsing from the stomach up in Beckettian fashion. Lively Icarus obeys his father’s whistle then flies into inconsolable grief over the mouse, darts around the stage or complements his father’s sound patterns.

They eventually escape in something like an early monoplane. Built on a horizontal pole, its open ‘cockpit’ whirls giddily, or loops a loop like one of the stomach-churning rides at Alton Towers. From the audience it’s all good fun.

For the performers, whirled around and assisted in dropping objects from their ride by four black-clad stagehands who scurry around like mice, it must be more vertiginous. Both cope wonderfully well, holding on to each other’s coats when one seems likely to be sucked out by the air.

Like Beckett - like clowns - there’s something movingly sympathetic in the earnestly followed rituals of father and son, leader and not quite subordinated led. Icarus sends his father winging to safety as his machine nears the burning sun, but he eventually denies Daedalus’s three-part mindset. It’s a sort of freedom, as is this pair’s flight from their underground prison, in a production matching comic precision of performance with energy and an undercurrent of seriousness.

Performers: Javad Namaki, Hamidreza Naeimi Jegarlouei.
Stage Hands: Ali Nasresfahani, Hamidreza Mir Latifi, Ata Moghimi, Mohammadreza Ghanizadeh.

Director: Homayun Ghanizadeh.

2008-11-26 13:08:53