You come out of this show slightly deafened. Given that it's the opening production of the 22nd London international mime festival, that might seem a surprising reaction. But mime has long ceased to be a matter of soundless gesture; it's a word that now embraces almost any form of visual theatrical event. While welcoming the new eclecticism I still find myself turned off by the monotonous intensity of this particular Russian import.
BlackSKYwhite was formed in Moscow in 1988 and boasts two performers, Marcella Soltan and Andrej Ivashnev, under the direction of Dmitri Ariupin. Their show offers us strange images of death and of humankind as an overwound automaton. The bald, gnomic man appears variously as a trudging figure bound to the upper world by a strip of canvas and as a manic juggler; the woman, sporting ever more outlandish pointy-hatted costumes, contorts her body like a skeletal memento mori. Sometimes the two figures interact. More often, they are are encased in solitude. Meanwhile the score relentlessly increases in volume.
The technical skill is undeniable: Soltan, in particular, seems to have an astonishing physical plasticity. But several things disturb me about this show. One is the director's claim that "we have no politics, no messages". Rarely have I seen a show that stated with such overbearing insistence that modern people are hollow machines progressing towards a meaningless death. It is a tenable view that would have been shared by many Expressionists and Absurdists. But whereas in drama, with its interplay of characters, there would be scope for challenge and opposition, here all we get is repeated illustration of a determinist vision. This is theatre of sensation - a procession of shocks in pursuit of a single idea.
The mime festival in the next two weeks will doubtless offer many alternative viewpoints. But I wonder whether, in scorning the idea of mime as a white-faced Frenchman walking into the wind, we haven't thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Marceau, in the course of an evening, would embrace both mortality and mischief, spinning between tragedy and comedy. Today mime seems increasingly to offer us polar opposites rather than an inclusive view of human experience. Those who relished the grotesquerie of Castellucci's freakshow Giulio Cesare will probably enjoy Bertrand's Toys. Myself, I felt the need afterwards for a long walk along the South Bank both to clear my head and to remind myself that we are still, if lucky, free agents.
At the Purcell Room, London SE1 (020-7960 4242), until Wednesday, then at Phoenix Arts, Leicester (0116-255 4854), Friday and Saturday.
