THE VISITATION OF MR COLLIONI. To 1 May.

Tour

THE VISITATION OF MR COLLIONI and other divine interventions
devised by the company from original short stories by Anna Maria Murphy

Platform 4 theatre company Tour to 1 May 2004
Runs 1hr no interval
Review Hazel Brown 9 March 2004 at Lighthouse Studio, Poole

Angels, cakes and the sad story of a refugee mixed to create a charming story.Platform 4 has created a sad and magical story that adds up to a charming hour of theatre. The two performers spin out a modern fairy tale on the tiny set that is not only a patisserie in London, but also a lingerie shop, a church and flooded Venice.

Mr Collioni is a baker who is obsessed with trying to find angels. He has a whole set of machinery in his bakery with which he tries to identify their presence after the customers go home, but finds that the more ways we have of communicating, the harder it is to hear. However, he doesn't know his waitress, Margaret, is actually an angel, who watches over him and helps him find his past. When she is alone and revealing her thoughts as an angel, she speaks in tumbling poetic lines: Cappucino-frappacino-double-latte-expresso-your feelings. We like angelicus cakus made of clouds and dreams. While, as the waitress, she is quiet and observant.

Slowly, Mr Collioni discovers the truth behind his need to search for angels, as the story of his conception and birth in Italy, abandonment, arrival in London and becoming a baker are re-enacted and come to him as if recorded on his angel-hunting machinery. The story unfolds, with the two performers playing all the parts, charmingly and magically. I loved the idea that a feathered bra is where an angel might keep her wings, that the earth moves catastrophically after a shy, cake-loving young woman and a trainee priest fall in love in church and that a fastidious Englishman would step into the flood waters to rescue his notebooks but abandon them to look after a pregnant woman stuck in a tree.

The two performers are enormously appealing and engage your sympathy and heart immediately. Their fast-paced form of physical theatre adds a dimension to the fantasy that carries you through to the true feelings of love and loss that are at the core of the story a piece of theatre for the young and old to enjoy.

Performers:
Sarah Thom
Colin Michael Carmichael

Directors: Catherine Church, Richard Cuming
Designer: Fred Meller
Lighting: Helen Morley
Sound: Jules Bushell

2004-03-17 01:25:34