Last year they tackled mums, now attention turns to dad. The Belgian dance-theatre company Peeping Tom follow up their hit show Mother with the second work in a family-themed trilogy. Fathers may be the focus, but really this seems like a show about ageing, the confusion and indignity of losing your agency and your concrete grasp on the world. Before us is a desolate hall with dim lights and trestle tables. It slowly dawns that we’re in an old people’s home, albeit one where nice middle-aged ladies play drums in jazz bands and a woman’s head pops out of a saucepan of soup.
This oddball company’s work is made of visual jokes, rubber-bodied dance and an eerie not-quite-normality that is all entertainingly surreal. The sense of shifting reality suits this theme – the questioning of memory, the slipping of the self – and family dynamics, as ever, make rich material for the stage. Father picks up the frustrations of relationships where tempers are quick to rise (“You always ask the same questions!”), and the tenderness, exasperation and impatience of dealing with elderly parents.
There are some silly gags – a bit of slapstick with a telescopic broom steals the show – but also brief moments that are truly harrowing: one man can’t remember his daughter’s name; another is browbeaten and treated like a child. Other scenes are heartening. When a wizened, lank-haired man leaves an audience of elderly ladies swooning as he takes to the piano for a wobbly voiced chorus of Feelings, we’re reminded that older people are not a problem to be solved or pitied, but people with personalities, pasts and inner lives.
The older members of the cast are joined by five younger dancers, whose bodies stretch and ping in elastic-limbed contortions, taking tiny actions, like battling away an insect or putting on a shoe, and expanding them into frantic numbers. There’s a question mark over what some of this dance adds, other than their bodies enhancing a sense of pliable reality, but Father is confident in the creation of its world, distinctive in its voice and poignant in its subject matter.
At the Barbican, London, until 2 February. The London international mime festival runs until 3 February.
