ISABELLA'S ROOM. To 11 November.

Glasgow

ISABELLA’S ROOM
by Jan Lauwers, with material by Anneke Bonnema translated by (English) Gregory Ball, (French) Monique Nagielkopf, Olivier Taymans

Tramway (Tramway 1) To 11 November 2006
Runs 2hr 5min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 November

Life and imagination explored in sensationally skilful performance.
Few people can have made such creative use of an inheritance as Jan Lauwers has of the legacy left him by his father. There again, a large collection of African artefacts isn’t your run-of-the-mill estate. Here they are, sculpted penis and severed head included, spread across the Tramway’s largest stage to accompany the invented life story of Isabella, born 1910 and woman of the 20th-century, in Belgian Need Company’s theatre/dance performance.

In style, there’s a hint of Robert Lepage, a taste of Forced Entertainment. But Need Company are their own people. Anyone believing Lepage’s Dragon’s Trilogy was souped-up soap opera, might think the same of this. And they’d be wrong again.

Isabella’s Room is a game of the imagination right from Viviane De Muynck’s introduction, asking us to suppose a blind woman can see. The performance’s free-flowing style recreates a life through its defining moments, allowing the rest to be perfunctory or unconvincing, as in Isabella’s sudden inheritance of the artefact-filled room in Paris from her lighthouse-keeping parents.

She takes some convincing they were her parents, having believed their story of her regal origins. As her Desert Prince ideal, Julien Faure early on provides a moment of dance then shruggingly gives up, his presence being then only her momentary thought.

Dance and song weave through Isabella’s story, often growing from an individual’s movement, or barely audible voice, building to a group routine. Significant areas of life are celebrated with sung or choreographed expansion, while elsewhere years pass, marked by a single percussive beat.

Lauwers has formed something rich and strange from his inheritance, creating a story that explores love, truth and lies, all subtly interwoven. The piece also gives a sense of time, and the generations, passing as when Isabella’s lover Alexander declines from social and aesthetic lion of pre-war Parisian intellectual society to eccentric relic of the past.

Around De Muynck’s redoubtably assertive Isabella, the cast bubble and snake in words and movement with an energy and physicality (bare cleavages, torsos and limbs evident across the decades and the stage), making this a sensory as well as imaginative experience.

For European dates visit www.needcompany.org

Isabella: Viviane De Muynck
Anna: Anneke Bonnema
Arthur: Benoit Gob
Alexander: Hans Petter Dahl
Frank: Maarten Seghers
The Desert Prince: Julien Faure
Sister Joy: Louise Peterhoff
Sister Bad: Tijen Lawton
Narrator: Misha Downey

Director/Designer: Jan Lauwers
Lighting: Jan Lauwers, Jeroen Wuyts
Sound: Dre Schneider
Music: Hans Petter Dahl, Maarten Seghers
Lyrics: Jan Lauwers, Anneke Bonnema
Dance: Jul;ien Faure, Misha Downey, Tijen Lawton, Louise Peterhoff
Language coaches: (French) Anny Czupper, (English) Marty Sparks

2006-11-13 15:45:23