SCAPEGOAT. To 28 March.

London

SCAPEGOAT
by Paul Murray and Karen Glossop

Wishbone theatre company at Drill Hall 1 28 March 2004
Runs 1hr No interval

TICKETS: 020 7307 5060
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 March

Intriguing, individual piece with a fine restraint in form and presentation.With the vast expansion in the vocabulary of physical and visual theatre over recent decades, you might think there's nowhere left for a small-scale company to go. And maybe this has been done before but it's new to me. For Scapegoat's story is told as a kind of animated storyboard, or picture-strip narrative. It's inventive, refreshingly low-key and avoids any start-stop hesitations, building its own narrative rhythm.

Karen Glossop's Stella comes to the end of the road in a relationship while walking round Italy. Garage mechanic Giorgio has similar tensions with a sexually predatory partner. The two meet, get on together and part. But at least they're left with a sense of themselves that contrasts the fittingly sinister happenings around the two Others.

This story's enacted in brief tableaux behind two screens upper and lower which can roll up or down. It's a larger, opaque version of a two-pane vertical-sliding window. Depending on the positioning of these screens we either see the lower parts of any action as in the opening, where the two travellers put tentative feet in water, or later when the mechanic lies fully visible as under a car while the lower part of his dominating partner stands over him.

Or we see the top area, giving, for example an image of Stella standing on a mountain peak. Again, scenes can show a mid-height section. These brief progressions are played with deliberation and calm, helping to maintain the smooth rhythm.

The exception is a central, extended scene where the two performers emerge in front of the screens for the meeting of Stella and Giorgio. Playful literally; his lunchtime's filled with football practice yet with the underlying sense of an unspoken attraction of two people both on a rebound, this scene eventually vapourises in line with the spirit of transience over the whole piece.

It is by turns touching, moving, comic and grotesque and delightfully individual, carving (if that's not too forceful a term for something so delicately poised, yet never over-precious) out its own place in the multi-faceted world of contemporary visual performance.

Performers:
Paul Murray, Karen Glossop

Directors/Designers: Paul Murray, Karen Glossop
Lighting: Linda Ekholm
Visual consultant: Paul Dubois
Masks: Ben Ruthven Taggart

2004-03-25 23:01:14