SISTER SISTER.

Tour

SISTER SISTER

Boilerhouse Theatre Tour to 11 May 2003
Runs: No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 11 May at Low Green Ayr

Theatrical daring that makes its point spectacularly.
Sometimes I think I could do what Kenneth Branagh does. Or Simon Russell-Beale. Given some gender-fixing I could have a go at Vanessa Redgrave. Zoe Wanamaker even. But not within a millennium could I begin to do what Chantal McCormick and Matilda Leyser do in Boilerhouse’s brave-the-late-spring-elements outdoor show.

Two sisters compete to win in some undefined contest; their early sister-act, clinching 3 metres up hand-held ladders, turns to war as they clamber along air-swayed ropes and up the ladders of two high, adjacent towers. This takes them well beyond spine and neck-breaking potential. Even in safety harnesses it looks more than scary in the open-air, on a set doused by rain, with any amount of breeze gusting from the nearby Atlantic.

Are they acrobats with a sense of theatre? Actors who missed the nerve-dangling Olympics? Anyway, they’re admirably high in the ‘can-do’ stakes: that sense of physical ability that leads theatre audiences, even when caught up in a play, to applaud a skill like singing, dancing. Or risking your neck while delivering somebody’s script and somebody else’s direction.

They climb and coil down high ropes. The twin ladders shear apart, and they set up rival homes, simple cleaning becoming an act of Blue v Yellow hate. Their platform-rooms collapse leaving just ladders, hanging from an industrial crane. They end with nothing – balletically swimming round each other in high air as the lights fade on their limbo.

Meanwhile music pounds the atmosphere; a video montage counterpoints their quarrel with their attractive faces, draining to black-and-white pictures of a rubble-wasteland and anonymous crowds flowing through a bleak city. Occasional colour points back to the live action: a yellow chair atop the ruins; more usually the garish yellow or blue iris of an eye observing this urban-spoiled context.

Gentler colour images of the sisters as happy girls recall the similar images of innocence in last year’s Boilerhouse piece, the superb .Running Girl. Final film-credits dedicate the piece to the people of Bosnia. A bit ‘yesterday’s war’? Not during this thrilling show – politically broad-brush, no doubt, but the physical ‘ooh’ factor intensifying its humanity.

Blue Sister: Chantal McCormick
Yellow Sister: Matilda Leyser

Directors: Paul Pinson, Roxana Pope

2003-05-16 10:14:42