HANGING BY A THREAD. To 16 March.

London.

HANGING BY A THREAD
Devised by Amelia Pimolott and Hannah Marshall.

Little Angel Theatre 14 Dagmar Passage N1 2DN To 16 March 2008.
Tue-Sun 8pm.
Runs 1hr 5min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7226 1787.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 2 March.

Mystic messages from meadow and bed.
A picture can be worth a thousand words. But sometimes a few captions help explain what those thousand words might be. They might help with this BAC-commissioned piece by The Ding Foundation, dominated by a double-bed with a patchwork cover suggesting an agricultural landscape. At the start there’s a breath-like rising and falling near the bottom of this bed. Then a humanoid head and torso arise at its top.

The face is like a wrinkled cowl – in fact, that’s what it is, for it reshapes to reveal a human face (or the white mask of one) beneath. This female figure repeatedly knits coloured threads supplied and then snipped by a younger female who initially seems either a puppet with a lifelike white face, or a human acting exactly as a puppet.

It turns out a bit of both, though the upper body’s certainly manufactured; its hollow innards and wooden frame can be seen through non-existent arm sockets. By knee-height this figure’s merged with a puppeteer. She serves stimulants and tranquillisers to her bed-bound companion, from the top of the other furnishing, a player-piano that opens up to reveal a treasury of yellow flowers.

At other times, this brightly-dressed young figure’s treading the grassland revealed behind the revolving bedhead. Here there’s a tiny puppet-man, a bald figure who later perches on the player-piano’s handle, managing to set it going.

Meanwhile in the bed, various additions to the cover-as-countryside are added; a knitted cottage, a tree and cow added from under the covers. They may represent the dreams of the bed’s occupant. If so, she may, thanks to not taking the pills, reach them as she climbs from the bed, over its head to the meadow behind.

Perhaps knowing the piece’s twin sources, Judith Krantz’s I Told You Once and The Summer Book by Tove Jansen, would reveal more. Maybe along the 18-month devising process narrative clarity has ceased to seem important. Perhaps ambiguity adds to the piece’s sense of significance. It’s an individual hour, and each viewer will decide, from what they find within, how richly rewarding it’s been for them.

Performers: Amelia Pimloott, Hannah Marshall.

Director: Steve Tiplady.
Lighting: Chahine Yavroyan.
Puppets: Richard Rudnicki, Tristram Phillips.

2008-03-05 11:04:43