Mini sagas are supposed to have gone out of fashion, but at the London International Mime Festival they are all the rage. It's Your Film, presented by Stan's Cafe, is an intriguing four-minute piece of theatre that looks and feels like a cross between a David Lynch movie and a piece of film noir but is in fact performed by live actors for an audience of one sitting in a viewing booth.
Aberrations du Documentaliste, meanwhile, is a 45-minute tabletop miniature for an audience of just 35 in which an old man in a library (the distinguished French actor Jacques Fornier) tries to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Throughout, you hear the sound of dripping water, which acts like an eternal clock as tiny figures - some so amazingly lifelike that for a moment you wonder whether the creators have discovered how to shrink human beings - appear to demonstrate different theories about the creation of the world.
Both these performances are immensely assured and both create complete and engrossing worlds, particularly the latter, with its Borges-style, dreamlike atmosphere and metaphysical speculation. But they are also rather emotionally distant works, so bound up in the necessary technical skill that the content takes second place.
It's Your Film raises interesting questions about the relationship of audience and performer, particularly in the closing sequence when you feel that it is you rather than the cast who are in close-up. But it needs to be developed beyond its current timespan in order to create a truly satisfying narrative and explore this issue further.
Aberrations - which is performed in French and is stylistically peculiarly French - is strong on images but sometimes short on clarity. The puppetry is a marvel, but while the old man in the library appears to have some kind of revelation, I remained in the dark. Still, there is much to admire and enjoy if you just let it all wash over you.
Paolo Nani's The Letter was a big hit at last year's festival. I can't think why. I can only assume that this simple clowning show, in which a man writes a letter to his grandmother in a succession of different characterisations and styles, has gone through some changes since it was here in 1999. There is no doubting Nani's physical theatre skills, but the performance is so over-embellished and the audience participation so cringe-making that its natural comedy is all but suffocated. If he did rather less, Nani would make us laugh all the more.
Last performance tonight. Information: 0171-637 5661
