One of the things I love about the Belgian company Ontroerend Goed is that every piece they make is different. They’ve always dared to take risks – some of which pay off and some of which definitely don’t. That’s just as it should be, and in this latest piece they take the risk of trying to get us to contemplate the unimaginable: a world in which every human has vanished.
Except, as we trundle blindly towards environmental disaster and possible nuclear catastrophe, it’s not as unimaginable as we’d like to think.
Performer Valentijn Dhaenens offers an alternative vision where the theatre space in which we sit is suddenly voided of people. Our belongings remain but the room is filled with our absence. Mobile phones start to bleep and then die. Rats and cockroaches take over the space, fires break out across the city, nature encroaches, through walls and ceiling, and centuries pass. The room becomes like the palace in Sleeping Beauty, but there is nobody left to awaken with a kiss and nobody to deliver one.
It’s a neat conceit and it certainly concentrates the mind. But Dhaenans’ delivery is sometimes so low-key that World Without Us verges on the soporific, even as the piece poignantly reminds us of the urgency of our situation and the fragility of the existence that we so take for granted.
•At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 28 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
