Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl (The Barbican)

“Taxidermied animals creep into view”

The Office with a taxidermied twist is an excellent description of this apocalyptic physical comedy from American duo Geoff Sobelle and Charlotte Ford. Emerging from an oversized bin and the office toilet, Gerry and Rhoda appear ready for a day at their workplace which is eerily devoid of any signs of other human life. Settling into their respective routines, Rhoda obliviously indulges in her impulsive snacking habit whilst Gerry begins compulsively rearranging his post it note collection and obsessively stalks a particularly obnoxious fly. However the monotony of office routine is slowly shattered by the intrusion of some rather unwelcome furry friends. A ferret scuttles furtively across the floor, a badger settles in between the folders, plants burst out of filing cabinets and a deer or two appear casually from the behind the doors. Unable to cope with the exotic events of the day, predictably, the two workers give into their wild side and mayhem ensues leading to the final explosive climax involving the collapsing of walls and an ingenious bear attack all set to the sinister synthesized chords of Debussy’s Claire de Lune.

There are some hilarious pantomime elements to this play. Taxidermied animals slowly creep into view causing you to want to scream “It’s behind you” to the oblivious characters on stage, and their unpredictable reactions to the strange events never fail to disappoint. Both Sobelle and Ford possess that rare comedic talent of pushing a joke to its absolute limit without letting it wear thin, as well as a formidable mastery of the dramatic pause, employing excellent comedic timing. The physical characterization of the neurotic, irritable characters perfectly captures the social awkwardness exploited so effectively by Ricky Gervais et al. but this physical portrayal gave it a refreshing and much darker twist. The appearance of the taxidermied animals is well choreographed, often leaving you clueless as to which office appliance they had materialized from this time, although from time to time the flash of a hand quickly diving back behind the door that the pheasant had appeared from ruined the magic of the moment.

The ecological message of the play was clear; in these concrete fortresses we’ve built, we’ve removed ourselves so far from the natural world, that the two worlds cannot co-exist and this will be to our own detriment. In the end the natural order shall be restored. However, Sobelle and Ford manage to wonderfully entwine this with message with an absurd and hilarious physical comedy parodying the pressures of modern life.

La Porta (Southbank)

“The door came into its own as a character when it accidentally… ‘died’”

Clowning as a visual theatre is one less commonly seen on the London stage. And Compagnia 2+1’s performance of their show La Porta was definitely in keeping with what most people think of as traditional clowning, complete with brass, juggling, acrobatics, funny hairstyles and falling over.

Compagnia 2 + 1 are comprised of Swiss clowning duo Bernard Stockli and Andreas Manz and clown and acrobat Kai Leclerc. They hail from a very traditional clowning background, touring with famous circus companies such as Circus Knie, Circus Monti and Barnum and Bailey. Leclerc is presented as the multilingual, opera-singing, more serious 1. Whereas Stockli and Manz are the hopeless, but very endearing, 2.

The performance centres around a red door in the centre of the stage, La Porta, which facilitates an array of tricks and scenarios, as the performers come and go through the door and fight over its possession. The continued struggle over ownership of the door, however, was tenuously linked to some other aspects of the show and when the clowns repeatedly fought over it, it became a little tiresome. On the other hand, I particularly liked the use of the door as a portal to a skiing holiday, where a clown shivered under flurries of little paper pieces, exaggeratedly blown at them by the two others, then, as the little drifts of paper lay about the stage and were later kicked up again, the clowns gave a classic shiver of remembrance. At one point the door came into its own as a character when it accidentally got caught in one of the clowns’ brawls and ‘died’ (wouldn’t open), and needed music in order to get it to open again.

Many of the tricks performed by the clowns were well executed and technically impressive. A Houdini-style escape from a box tied with ropes was excellent and some fantastic acrobatics were performed around a lamp. One of my favourite tricks was when Leclerc can-canned across the stage singing an aria whilst tearing up a copy of the evening standard and then opening it out into a copy of Le Figaro. Although, in between these ‘wow-factor’ tricks the sequences of slapstick or competitive door-possession wore a little thin.

That said, the interaction between the clowns themselves was very well portrayed and the characterisation was excellent, making them very likeable. Each clown had characteristic facial expressions, actions and movements that were very charming, as evidenced by repeated ‘awws’ from the crowd. This was something of an achievement as all three spent a large proportion of the show striving to inflict pain on the others.

Despite the fact that sometimes the focus on the door seemed a little strained and that I personally don’t find people being slapped in the face particularly funny, the show was entertaining, the characters of the clowns were endearing and the execution of the tricks impressive and unpretentious. The perfect show for anyone with a penchant for slapstick, and of course, the under 10s.

Cecily Goodwin