PHANTOM LIMB Touring to 1 December.

Tour

PHANTOM LIMB
by Spencer Hazel, with contributions byJane Siberry, Michael Timmins

Theatre Gargantua and 2021 Performance Touring to 1 December 2001
Runs 1hr No interval

Review Timothy Ramsden 21 November at Riverside Studios, London

British Canadian co-production with outstanding physical skills is charged with excitement and lyricism.Canada's Gargantua and Britain's 2021 Performance (established by Frantic Assembly's Spencer Hazel) join forces in this octane-packed piece of physical theatre. It's an exhilarating ride round the aftermath of artist-hero John Mackie. Mackie's Phantom Limb (a medical term referring to the continued feeling of an amputated leg or arm) is cult youth poetry. Judging from the overwritten, ill-controlled verse examples in the newsprint programme, the company has caught precisely the mediocrity of the actual work that often underlies such legends after their own lifetime.

Mackie died suddenly and young. What more is needed for fame? His soulful, post-adolescent absorption simultaneously offers no bar to understanding while having no very evident meaning. Incidents from Mackie's life are woven by friends' memories into a magic which seems to express all their own feelings. It comes across through both straight talk, imbued with the urgency of group excitement, and poetically patterned dialogue, at times echoed in time-lapsed recordings.

But the actors' bodies carry most meaning. Lovers climb, with different degrees of skill, to a hill-top meeting. Friends cling to the V-section wall that provides the only interruption to the open performance space, in a last desperate attempt to hang on to their collective past. Sudden bursts of group energy express positive and negative emotions, in one case combined with a harmonised Dies Irae. All these make up Phantom Limb's abiding images.

It's through such physicality that the production expresses the excitement and wonder of the friends astonished to realise their friend, whose images descend all over them on hundreds of postcards rained down as if in a propaganda air-drop, was someone who became an icon for their own lives. Lopped untimely from their lives as Mackie was, the sensation sticks. As well it might if the hero had half this production's charisma count.

Tours to Riverside Studios, Hammersmith to 24 November, Unity Theatre Liverpool 27 November, Phoenix Theatre Leicester 28 November, Roadmender Northampton 29 November, Alhambra Studio Bradford 1 December.

Acting ensemble:
Erica Buss
Cait Davis
Spencer Hazel
G.R. McBride
Diane Niec
Michael Spence
Jacquie P.A. Thomas

Director: Jacquie P.A. Thomas
Designer: Michael Spence
Costumes: Erica Connor
Lighting/Choreographer: Spencer Hazel
Music: Erica Buss, Spencer Hazel, Acting Ensemble

2001-11-22 02:17:50