THE THEFT OF SITA by Nigel Jamieson. Touring to 24 November.

Tour

THE THEFT OF SITA
conceived by Nigel Jamieson

Runs 1hr 35min No interval
Review Timothy Ramsden 3 November at Warwick Arts Centre

The Ramayana meets globalisation in this Indonesian tale from Australia.Think puppets: think big. Nigel Jamieson's fabulous production involves teams of puppet, photo and animation makers, let alone the on-stage band (who must be credited – Paul Grabowsky's jazz and Balinese tinged score is a major part of this remarkable piece's impact). As are the five puppeteers who scurry around for almost two hours on wheeled-trolleys ensuring the fantastic array of shadow puppets are pinpointed in the exact spot at the right moment behind the huge front screen on which most of the action is displayed.

Jamieson starts in pastoral mode, with a couple of the Asian epic Ramayana's servants, Twalen and Merdah, walking a forest. It's not quite an idyll, involving an extended stand-off with a tiger in persistent attack mode. But this is nothing beside what happens when, in the style of John Boorman's Amazon basin film The Emerald Forest, the foliage to which we've just grown accustomed is sent crashing by diggers. Land that had always been just land becomes property.

Then the couple are sent to the big city. But this is no setting for a Crocodile Dundee-style comedy. As Grabowsky's music signals in snarls and discords, it's a place of violence and loneliness. When the pair say they are looking for the kidnapped Sita, they find themselves hustled by pimps selling sex. Separated from each other, the lost travellers end up on the city dump, a down-and-out's doss-area subjected to tough-tactic police raids.

Putting these two, traditional epic and industrial present, together is fruitful; each commenting on the other. Not since husband and wife J.B. Priestley and Jaquetta Hawkes reported to each other on modern Texas and traditional Central American civilisation during the 1950s in Journey Down A Rainbow have two such disparate societies been so fruitfully enmeshed.

Jamieson ends with an extended protest as Twalen and Merdah re-irrigate the peasants' fields with the water stolen for white water rafters, as they dodge the bungi-jumpers leaping down into the frame, and collect a following of the dispossessed.

Sorting the world stage itself may not prove quite so simple, but The Theft of Sita is a rare example of a piece that provokes awareness while astounding with a breath-taking example of technology working in harmony with the human imagination.

Tours to Oxford Playhouse 14-17 November, Snape Maltings 23-24 November.

Performers/Puppeteers: I Made Sidia
Peter Wilson
Steve Howarth
Paul Moore
Udo Foerster

Musicians: I Wayan Gde Yudane
I Made Subandi
I Gusti Putu Sudarta
I Ketut Lanus
Adrian Sherriff
Sang Nyoman Putra Arsawijaya
Sandy Evans
Nicko Schauble
Ren Walters
Jason Bunn

Vocalists: Katie Noonan
I Gusti Putu Sudarta

Director: Nigel Jamieson
Dalang/Indonesian Puppet Direction: I Made Sidia
Designer: Julian Crouch
Lighting: Damien Cooper
Composer: Paul Grabowsky, I Wayan Gde Yudane
Musical Direction: Niko Schauble, I Wayan Gde Yudane
Computer and Graphic Animation: Andrew Petrusevics

2001-11-09 13:39:01