BORDERS AND BRUTALITIES,
Maybe I shouldnt review what is essentially physical-theatre. I have no dance-cred, and I was pleased to be warned years ago by the great Benedict Nightingale, when I took over as Times chief theatre critic. “There’s a marvellous chap called Donald Hutera” he said, “which means you can always get out of doing MIME1 !” And indeed, I like words and complicated ideas alongside emotional and compassionate truths.
But this piece is from the British-Israeli creator of GECKO Amit Lahav, and its topic couldn’t be hotter: exile, emigration, refugees. Lahan’s grandmother escaped persecution in Yemen and flec to Palestine . He calls this 80-minute piece “a provocative story of desperation, compassion and acceptance”.
We can tell straight away that the first dancing group – rather merry in a Mediterranean stomping way – are border-guard baddies manning a red-and-white barrier, because they have peaked caps and heavy leather belts. A series of bored refugees are nodded through, then one woman in a headscarf stopped, stigmatized with yellow paint. She and others manage to end up with a sofa and television and family hugging, but in no time another lot, Central-Asian or North-African looking figures, crowd in and invade their space. They dance too, but eventually as the show goes on are forced to smear on whiteface and wear cockney caps , while a European-white couple waltz through another barrier unchallenged (there’s a satirical Boris wig involved at one point). The only immigrant who doesn’t whiteface gets sort of crushed under hot lamps. There’s a prison cell door. And on it goes.
Let’s be clear: there are people who will tell you, with some passion, that this sort of expression in dance/mime/music/and scattered fragments of languages (no surtitles). is what theatre should be about . They will agree to Gecko’s website demand to meet it with “ openhearted emotion”. Some, at the matinee I saw, felt that way and whooped through multiple curtain calls.
But there are other people who will with equal clarity wish they had not wasted time and up to £69 on it, because for all its impassioned non-stop movement KIN says nothing more than what we knew. That the world is full of suffering and anxiety, and that we should know this and give whatever welcome and money we can .
A third group, those who don’t think we should bother at all, will not in any case have come to the Lyttelton to be told so.
It is not my job to tell you which group to side with. Technically KIN has interest, fascinating surround-sound, and cleverly evocative music by Dave Price . The movement rarely calms, expressing mainly distress and confusion with little sense of human joy, and there’s some ingenious dim-lit puppetry (the whole show is tenebrous). The message is simplistic but heartfelt, In the last moments, wearing orange lifejackets to remind us of snall boat crossings, the players (none of whom I think actually arrived that way) step forward and declare their real life personal status – coming from among other lands Mexico and China, and in one case having a Norwegian heritage and therefore claiming to have no home at all.
To be brutally honest, after the evocation of harsh borders, stigmatizing paint and enforced whiteface , that personalization feels cheap. But yes, it’s skilful. Even if, preaching to the choir in the NT stalls, it achieves little.
To 27 jan
theatreCat 