PANIC To 16 May.
London
PANIC
Barbican Theatre (The Pit) To 16 May 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat 25 April, 9, 16 May 2.30pm.
Runs 1hr 40min no interval.
TICKETS: 0845 120 7550.
www.barbican.org.uk/bite
Review: Carole Woddis 20 April.
Not quite the Bee’s knees.
Over the years, Improbable Theatre have treated us to some rare old tricks including a lot of strange things to do with brown paper and newspapers. Improvisation, too, has played a large part in their creations. Panic, their latest, feels very much in that off-the-cuff, let’s-make-something-out-of nothing, sort of 1970s tradition, though there is nothing slaphappy about its technical expertise.
Directors Julian Crouch and Lee Simpson, with musician-composer Nick Powell and Chris Redmond (onstage sound operator), and the combined forces of Lysander Ashton (video design), Phil Eddolls (co-designer) and Colin Grenfell (lighting) accomplish some deft visual sleights of hand and musical motifs more akin to sophisticated than `rough theatre’.
The impro quality comes from the delivery led gargantually by Phelim McDermott hogging the stage as the Great God Pan (accompanied by various enormous appendages) and inter alia telling us about the many various panics that have befallen him recently, including the nasty sounding labyrinthitis.
McDermott is accompanied by three somewhat longsuffering `nymphs’ – Angela Clerkin, Lucy Foster, and Matilda Leyser (occasional aerialist) - who introduce themselves at the start in winsome manner and proceed to scene-shift and act as general factotums to the sometimes strutting, sometimes miserablist McDermott/Pan.
Panic does, of course, produce moments of blissful self-deprecation and humour - for example McDermott detailing the self-help books to which he has succumbed amounting to a table strewn with a mountain of very familiar do-it-yourself, find-yourself blockbusters. On another occasion, tiny silhouetted figures cavort in a forest whilst at another point, Matilda hovers impressively in harness over McDermott’s prostrate body, either playfully or oppressively, according to how you perceive her.
It all feels a bit loose-limbed and indulgent, if delightful. Pan, complete with horns, beard and the required outsize phallus is represented, touchingly, by a small puppet operated by them all.
A slightly irreverent, send-up then of the male sex drive and the fears and alarms it induces, it’s constructed around a sequence of unconnected personal stories, some told by the `nymphs’ and pointing to a darker side. Pan, we are reminded, is also the god of rape as well as, surprisingly, bees.
Performers: Angela Clerkin, Lucy Foster, Matilda Leyser, Phelim McDermott.
Directors: Julian Crouch, Lee Simpson.
Designers: Julian Crouch, Phil Eddolls.
Lighting: Colin Grenfell.
Sound/Music: Nick Powell.
Video: Lysander Ashton.
2009-04-25 11:38:51