It’s been quite a while* since I’ve been to a show like this: physical theatre, depending as much on the choreography of gesture and movement as much as the narrative. After an exciting start, I felt sad that the show was playing to a half-full house, given that it’s only on till Saturday 28th July, and a lot of work went in to it. A co-production between Locus Theatre Company of Ireland, (Caroline McSweeney Artistic Director and director), and Teater TaTar of Denmark, this 65-minute-long piece was impressive and enjoyable up to a point, with the talented and expressive trio of performers, Katrine Bøegh Nielsen, Tora Balsleve Jespersen, and Ditte Laumann. But considering the themes it was addressing, death, survival instinct and grief, I was not moved.
There are moments of humour – the first line we hear is “If I were the last person alive, I would like to be a nurse” which sets the zany tone for the clownish humour that runs mischievously through the piece. A scene at the opera in particular is entertaining. But this is a piece mainly about struggle, about mortality, about loss. The sequences in the early part of the show, when deaths are occurring with alarming frequency, when a plague comes to town, are artfully and poignantly done. It becomes less engaging, however, when the focus shifts to individual grief. We do not know for whom each of the three is grieving. Grief is never generic, it’s always about the loss of someone extremely particular. It’s as if various expressions of grief were portrayed, and portrayed well, but the essential dramatic ingredient of engaging with the audience’s own feelings was missing. Who were we supposed to be mourning? Where was the pathos? I was not disturbed. Sex was notably absent from the piece; this production seemed to come from the head, not from the heart or the groin.
Excellently lit by Marcus Costello, the show was good to look at, and I loved the sense of expanse created in the Project’s Space Upstairs, in which the performers, satisfyingly, didn’t put a foot wrong.
{ 5 } Comments
I have to say that if the monologues of Ditte Laumann didn’t move you, you’re made of stone.
Grief is not generic but it is universal. The aim is not sympathy but reflection on its nature.
And there are many ways of coping with it, especially when one is also facing his/her own death.
That’s the point of the play. When one is confronted with Camus’ absurdity.
Lovely comment. I’d like to have been moved, believe me.
“The aim is not sympathy but reflection on its nature.”
Perhaps that’s where the difference lies between us – physical theatre can sidestep the cerebral and hit one in the guts, which is what I was hoping for; reflection on a concept alone is not enough for me.
Maybe I did not phrase it quite correctly.
Physical theatre engages an audience in a different level but not necessarily hits you in the guts.
Reflection in this case is, like in post-modern dance, is abstract. Reflective. Does not apply to analysis.
In fact the most moving moments are not to do with the text, but with the physical struggle of the performers, especially by the end of the piece, or when they have to let go of their loved ones before the corridor of death.
In those sequences, there were tears in the corners of my eyes.
Still, different people, different reactions. And that is the beauty of it. Otherwise the world would be quite boring. : )
This is a discussion I’d love to deepen, and as I said in my review, I felt sad that the short run of the show was not well attended, it deserved better.
The sense I have from your contributions is that there is a context to the piece, an intellectual framework of post-modernism, that helps you to engage with it on the level that moves you to tears. I freely admit to not being au fait with this discourse, and am suspicious of the necessity to “read up” before attending any piece of theatre (it is for this reason I never read programmes before a show). Perhaps this places me at a disadvantage. But, just as Gerard Mannix Flynn’s installation Something To Live For has a little panel on Dame Street entitled “How To Read an Installation”, I believe it’s perfectly acceptable to prime the viewer/audience member of any art form to help them appreciate what they are experiencing. The programme of “Same Same But Different” contained no such primer, and indeed assumed a level of familiarity with the form that didn’t do the show much favours.
And yet, as a former performer in physical theatre (the plays of Tom McIntyre in the Peacock in the 1980s) I acknowledge the simple truth and beauty of physical theatre that you name: different people, different reactions.
Hi there,
I’d love to deepen as well in the discussion.
I did not intend to justify the production intellectually, and even less to imply that the team of Same Same But Different was seeking such an approach.
It’s only my personal and insignificant point of view, understanding and interpretation.
What I was trying to clarify was that when I used the word ‘reflection’ it was because I understood the piece was treated in the tenets of reflective abstraction, not cerebrally, which is what you seemed to understand by my using the term.
Because of that abstraction, it is so open to interpretation and reaction.
Personally, I found it very poetic and it touched me at many levels that cannot be rationalised. I am also a performer, so I appreciated the show at that level more than at any analytical one.
I am also glad that other people had different reactions to it, because then you can build up on discussion. And that is something theatre needs to be constantly revitalised.
So it is highly refreshing to know there are people like you, open to discuss constructively. Thanks.
By the way, you might be interested in the following review of the show and, especially, in the reply it got.
http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/arts/avoid-notsogreat-danes-1047114.html
P.S. I would love to have seen those performances in the Peacock. I heard so much about McIntyre. But back in the 80’s I was still a teenager living in my country. Pity.
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